The mail keeps rolling in, bringing with it delicious parcels of kindness from our friends and supporters. Each envelope and parcel is met with huge amounts of excitement from the Epuni School children. Thank you again everyone, this means so much to all of us here.
Here’s a glimpse of some of the lovely koha that we have received lately:
Alex and Tilly from Blenheim sent in this beautiful drawing, along with a $20 note. We love how tall the sunflowers are in your picture Alex 🙂
Pip in Auckland posted us some seeds and liquid plant food. This is seriously useful stuff and we are really grateful – thanks heaps Pip!
Kaye from Grow from Here heard about Project Sunshine and asked if she could have a few packets of seeds, as she will plant them in many of the gardens she works in (check out the beautiful sunflowers on her website!).
In return, she kindly gave us two fruit trees: an apple and a mulberry (Poppy the baby is in the photo to give an idea of how big the trees are!) We will plant these trees in our orchard at the school. Sending you a great big sunshiney ‘hug of thanks’ Kaye.
Phil lives on Waiheke Island and sent us an awesome little package with chocolate, a dinosaur toy & this beautiful feather. He says it’s from a dinosaur. We love it!
Wow Emma – thank you *so* much for your amazing notebooks and pencils. The children were thrilled when they opened your parcel and can’t wait to use them for taking notes in the garden 🙂
Emma and Lucy gave us these packets of vegetable seeds. These are fantastic, as our little farmers will be able to grow them in the school garden and then cook them up for lunch!
Sheryll and Philip sent us some much-needed stamps. And we’ve already used them all up this week posting out over 60 envelopes, so they were incredibly useful.
Finally, today Emma from Heretaunga Kindergarten visited us and brought with her koha from the kindergarten children. Emma said:
“I discussed with the children what we should give as a koha, the most interesting was a picture of Africa and some dinosaur tails, however we have finally agreed on some worm wees from our worm farm. We are part of the enviroschools project so are enjoying the journey of sustainability too.”
And today she delivered two bottles of ‘worm wee’ to Epuni School. Ka rawe, ka pai! We really appreciate your thoughtfulness!
Our little farmers’ seed packets will be available at the Riverbank Market in Lower Hutt tomorrow morning (from very early ’til about lunchtime). We will also have sunflower seedlings for sale, and a limited amount of heritage tomato seedlings. All proceeds received will go towards funding a beehive at Epuni School. We’d love to see you there – come say hi!
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This week has been an awesome arty week for Project Sunshine. It’s been really wet and windy here in Wellington, so instead of spending lots of time in the garden, we’ve snuggled up inside with lovely art supplies and decorated lots of seed packets.
This morning we had visitors from Epuni Kindergarten. The gorgeous little people turned up to the library for a book reading session and saw us painting seed packets. Julia told them all about the magic sunflowers and asked them to choose a packet of seeds. They chose the rainbow packet, which they have taken back to plant at their kindergarten.
Here are some of the beautiful seed packets that the Epuni School children decorated today. Check out the clever collage!
Beautiful bright colours here too!
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This afternoon Project Sunshine was mentioned in the NZ Gardener Magazine‘s email ‘Get Growing’ newsletter. It gets emailed to lots of people around New Zealand and is full of interesting gardening tips and tricks, and advice on how to grow things like fruit and vegetables.
When the newsletter was emailed out, we started receiving lots of emails from people wanting packets of sunflower seeds. We posted out 14 envelopes this afternoon to Carterton, Auckland, Hamilton, Palmerston North, Ngaruawahia, Porirua, Blenheim, Northland and Gisborne and we have many, many more to send out over the weekend!
[Today’s story comes from Philip. He has never grown sunflowers before *and* he lives several stories up in an apartment in Wellington! He shares his growing adventures below.]
The colourful envelope of sunflower seeds from Project Sunshine that arrived in my letterbox one blustery spring day brought with it the promise of summer. This was going to be like the pockets of cheery daffodils that had popped up on my street, but bigger and better. The next thing I needed was a bit of germination. Can’t be that hard, right?
I decided to try little peat pots inside my apartment, along with some rich seedling mix and my trusty spray bottle to keep them damp but not too wet. That’s when the performance anxiety started to kick in. After a few days my neighbour was already asking if the seeds had sprouted. Not yet, I said awkwardly. What say they didn’t? Why would they? Should I be doing it outside and not six floors up in an apartment building? After a week of germination angst I was rewarded with the first sprouts. They were the best and most beautiful sunflower shoots ever.
Now most of the seeds I’ve planted have come up. A wise sunflower-growing friend suggested I get them to about 20 cms before planting them out. This will give them a better chance against greedy insects that love nothing more than to dine on tender sunflower shoots. At the rate they’re growing I might be planting them at Labour Weekend. I’ve scoped a few likely spots in the garden outside my building. Perhaps in among the daisies, or by the block wall out front which gets great sun. Or maybe on the bank by the tagged garages next door?
Yesterday it was a bit windy to be outside. So instead of tending to their garden, the Project Sunshine team embraced their artistic side and set about painting lots of sunflower seed packets.
With a brush in hand, our little farmers turned into little artists and created some absolutely stunning works of art.
The theme of the day was ‘loving our bees’ and each child painted a bee on a seed packet, as well as sunflowers and hearts and anything else sunshiney that captured their imagination.
We then let the works of art dry and enjoyed looking at all the bright colours on display.
Look at all the beautiful bees! These packets are going to contain a very special sort of sunflower seed – keep watching this space to find out more…
Thank you Phil and Tanya from Waiheke Island, for featuring us in the amazing children’s page ‘Imagined Worlds’, in the Gulf News. You can read the full text of the children’s page below.
It is pretty special that our seeds have travelled all the way up the country to Waiheke Island, where they’ll be grown in the community Food Forest. We hope the sunflowers bring a golden glow to the garden there, and look forward to hearing how they go.
For our update this week, we’re sharing a few of the awesome letters we’ve received. Term 4 started with an armful of letters and packages – we love all this mail!
A special thanks to Julie from Napier, Kapiti Primary School and Denise from Auckland for their beautiful letters. We hope our seeds grow big and tall, and bloom beautifully for you all 🙂
Our little project is starting to feel like something quite special indeed, as we have started receiving envelopes and handfuls full of koha for the children at Epuni School. We’ve also received envelopes with financial donations and bank payments as well – and so far we’ve fundraised over $100 to go towards beehives at the school.
Wow! Thank you everybody – this means so much to us, and really shows the children that acts of kindness do go a long way.
We thought you might like to see some of the lovely things that people have posted, delivered or handed to us to give to the Project Sunshine children:
Sam from Hamilton grows giant pumpkins. He has an awesome website full of growing information and tips and tricks on how to grow the biggest, fattest and best giant pumpkin! In exchange for a packet of sunflower seeds, Sam sent a packet of giant pumpkins seeds for the children to grow, along with some good planting information.
Diane Turner gave us a selection of bean seeds she has saved from her own garden. Some of the beans are heritage varieties and Diane also sent some lovely stories about the history of the plants – where they came from, who introduced them into New Zealand and how the beans are best eaten.
Rob gave us a handful of purple tutaekuri Maori potatoes. These look and taste different to the sort of potatoes you usually see for sale in markets and the supermarkets. Rob says they grow really well and are beautiful in salads. They’re also bright purple on the inside and we can’t wait to see how they grow.
Kara gave us a large amount of envelopes and a box of stamps, so we can keep sending out packets of seeds around the country. This has helped us immensely – thanks Kara!
Kelda is an awesome chef at Nikau Cafe, jam maker extraordinaire, and a gardener at the Brooklyn Community Orchard. In exchange for a few packets of seed for the orchard, Kelda gave us these beautiful jars of jam and marmalade for the children and other helpers at Epuni School. We think it will be absolutely delicious on the Purebread that is frequently gifted to the children at Epuni School. Such a treat 🙂
Here’s the buzz from this week. Keep reading below to see what we’ve been up to!
Our ‘Sunshine Day‘ got a mention in the Hutt News newspaper, thanks to reporter Karoline who joined us for part of the morning. (You can check out more photos from the day here). We’re hoping to do a few more community plantings like this at some point this term, so watch this space for further information.
We’ve posted out many, many envelopes full of sunflower seeds this week. It has been bloomin’ lovely! Please get in touch if you’d like a packet, or if you know someone in New Zealand that would.
We’ve also updated our map – it’s really cool to see the little trail of flowers spreading around the country and we think our little farmers will be really surprised when they come back from the school holiday break and see how far their seeds have been sent.
We’ve been decorating more seed packets – trying to keep up with the demand! It has been fun watching my six-year-old paint these seed packets with watercolour and acrylic paint, and this morning we experimented with some hand-made stamps.
And finally, we want to say a huge sunshiney *thank you* to everyone who has given us financial donations, or other forms of koha this week. We’ll do a separate blogpost about some of the fantastic things that we have received in return for packets of seed, which will all go to the children at Epuni School. And the financial donations mean that we’ve been able to buy lots more stamps, so we can post out more envelopes! We’re a little bit in love with these gorgeous bee stamps, which just go so well with the aims of our project.
You have your packet of beautiful Giant Russian sunflower seeds in your hand. Do you plant them straight in the ground, or should you first sow some seeds in pots?
At Project Sunshine, we do both planting methods, to make sure that we get the best sunflowery results!
Sowing directly in the ground
It’s pretty easy to sow your seeds directly in the ground. Before you plant, you need to make sure you’ve picked a good spot: sunflowers need at least 6 hours of sunshine a day. Once you’ve chosen a good spot, use a trowel and dig a small hole about 3cm deep, and then drop in a seed. Cover the hole again with a blanket of soil and then give it a drink of water.
Sunflowers are like people: they like to be in families and planted close together. Plant your seeds about 20cm apart. Water your seeds regularly, to make sure they don’t dry out – if the soil is kept damp, they should germinate in about 5-10 days.
Something else to bear in mind is that slugs and snails love to nibble on brand new sunflower leaves and stalks, and can quickly wipe out baby sunflower seedlings. To keep snails and slugs at bay you can place snail bait around your seeds (make sure you keep it well away from little people and pets) – otherwise you can always go out at night with a bucket and torch collect any snails that look like they’re heading towards your precious seedlings.
Planting seeds in pots
To ensure a good sunflower harvest, it is also a good idea to plant some seeds into pots. The seedlings can be transferred into the ground later on when they reach about 20cm high. There are several different pots you can choose to use and we’ve listed a few different examples below to give you an idea of the sorts of pots/containers to use. Just make sure that whatever pot you do use is fairly deep, as sunflowers send out a deep tap root. Something like an egg carton would be too shallow, for example, so go for a pot/container that has enough room to allow the sunflower to send down a good, strong root.
Make sure you use potting mix or seed-raising mix as your soil. The soil in pots needs to be light and airy for the plants to grow well. Dirt straight from the garden is too heavy and will clump down in pots. You can buy potting mix fairly cheaply from supermarkets and hardware stores. You can always make your own if you’re interested – here’s a good potting mix recipe.
Plastic pots
Plastic pots are great to use for sowing seeds – and you can use them again and again. Make sure they are nice and clean on the inside before filling them with potting mix. If you have bigger pots then you can sow a couple of seeds to each one. When the plants are big enough (about 20cm high), you’ll need to gently lift them and all of the soil out of the pots, and then plant them in the ground (Don’t plant your plastic pot in the ground!)
Take-away coffee cups
Take-away coffee cups are the perfect size for growing sunflower seedlings. Make sure your coffee cup is nice and clean, and make a small hole in the bottom for drainage (you don’t want your little pot to stay too damp, otherwise the roots will get mouldy). Then fill it with potting mix or seed-raising mix and add your seeds.
If you have a ‘bio’ or ‘eco-friendly’ coffee cup, which is designed to completely break down, then you can plant it straight into the ground when the plant is big enough, as the cardboard will disintegrate and the roots will push through the cardboard. Only do this if your coffee cup is an eco-friendly one though, as many take-away coffee cups have plastic in them, which will not break down in soil.
Peat pots
You can buy peat pots from gardening/hardware stores. I bought 16 from Mitre 10 for $8.00. They’re great because once your seedling is big enough, you can plant it straight in the ground along with the pot. Just make sure you don’t let the soil in them dry out.
Toilet rolls
Toilet rolls are also an inexpensive type of ‘seed starter’. By cutting four slots in a toilet roll, you can fold the flaps on the bottom – as you can see in the photo above. When you have enough toilet rolls, you can place them inside a plastic container, like an icecream container, and then fill each one with potting mix.
Be careful not to over-water the toilet roll planters, as they can get mouldy if they get too wet (update: half the ones I just planted got very mouldy on the outside, so great care needs to be taken when watering them). Because the rolls are made of cardboard, they can also be planted directly into the ground when the plants are big enough as the cardboard will quickly break down.
Folded newspaper containers
You can also make your own inexpensive seed starting containers by folding sheets of newspaper. By googling ‘how to make newspaper seedling pots’, you can find lots of different folding methods. We quite like the method shown in the youtube video below, as it is simple – all you need is a sheet of newspaper and a tall glass (you might need an adult to help you if you’re younger).
When the seedlings are big enough, the newspaper container can also be planted directly into the ground with the seedling, as the newspaper will break down quickly in the soil.
Project Sunshine Aotearoa 