Koha in the mail this week

Julia has been saving up the mail, and handed me a beautiful bunch of letters and parcels this week.

Thank you Riccarton Primary School in Christchurch, Kelburn Playcentre in Wellington and Putiki Kindergarten in Whanganui for your lovely letters and seeds:

We received this beautiful letter from the tamariki o Nga Hau e Wha at Merivale School in Tauranga, as well as some kamokamo seeds and information about how to grow them. Kia ora – we can’t wait to plant these seeds!

And finally, thank you Mary Ann in Auckland for this amazing sunflowery apron! We think it’s seriously cool and so perfect for our little farmers. I bet there’ll be a race in the kitchen to see who gets to wear it first 😉

Sunflower power at Waipu School and Gladstone School

Mrs Green from Waipu Primary School in Northland sent us these gorgeous photos of her class planting out their sunflower seedlings. She says they’ll have “lots of watering and tender loving care from now on”.

We love how the sunflowers are going to grow next to the students’ awesome scarecrow! Thank you Room 11 🙂

And today we received this beautiful card from the students in room 2 at Gladstone School, in the Wairarapa. In summer, the students wear bright yellow sun hats when they’re outside and people driving past often comment on how they look like lovely sunflowers. It’s really cool knowing that our sunflower seeds are being looked after by little sunflowers!

Koha and sharing

Here at Project Sunshine not only do we love helping our bees and making our communities beautiful – we love sharing too.

The concept of the sharing table is central to our sister Common Unity project; we often place our homegrown produce on it for people to share. We also invite people from our community to come and share a meal with us. In return, we ask for people to share something special with us – to offer koha.

The children have a saying: “we have two hands: one for giving and one for receiving”. In this way, our children learn that acts of kindness go a long way. They also learn that they have the power to create change and make their environment even more beautiful. The sorts of things that people offer as koha can range from seeds that people have saved, little bits of equipment for the garden, such as containers for planting seed – and on our open days it might be a shared song. All these things are special and help us strengthen our community bonds.

With Project Sunshine, the Epuni School children want to send their sunflower seeds far and wide throughout New Zealand. In return, you might receive an email from us asking for an act of reciprocity, or koha.

We gratefully receive anything that people are willing to share with us. Koha could be a simple self-addressed envelope for us to post seeds to you in, some stamps, a few coins, some seeds of vegetables for the children here to plant in their mandala garden, or perhaps other sunflower seeds that you yourself might have saved and wish to share with the children. Whatever you think is appropriate and useful will go a long way towards helping our project thrive. (Please just drop us a line via email if you wish to make a larger financial contribution.)

Through simple actions, such as sharing and kindness, our children have the power to grow and make amazing changes to our world. Please help us take this message to the rest of Aotearoa, New Zealand.

Harvesting seed

Hello sunshiny friends. A wee update on what we have been up to since our harvest. The children have been tackling the task of stripping the heads of seeds and will soon begin to pack them up to send out. It’s a huge task, and we have produced enough seed to send to every NZ school… should they want it! The little ones have been using the trays of drying seed as a sensory exercise… they feel magic to run your hands through and are great for maths and counting. The big seniors had the wonderful task of ripping out the remains of the field, which was really tough work for our farmers! The result is a mountain of compost ready to feed next season’s efforts. Please get in touch if you would like to pre-order seed. We ask for a small koha to cover postage costs. This project remains a gift from our community to the bees and all other children of NZ.

Harvest time – March 2013

Hello lovely sunflower friends.

We have had a pretty wonderful growing season with our field that was planted at Epuni School back in October. Our flowers have survived Christmas winds and now a drought. But despite this they have managed to produce some enormous heads. In the last two weeks we started harvesting the flowers and were lucky enough to have our sunflower friends from Pomare School come join us for a harvest celebration last week. Over the winter, our Epuni children will pack up the seeds ready to send out to any school or community group in New Zealand that would like to join with us in raising awareness of bee populations and just for the pure joy of spreading sunshine through our communities. Our sunflower field has brought so much happiness and beauty to our neighbourhood, it has hosted an amazing array of insect life and will support the birds that are struggling through this dry period. Please get in touch with us if you would like seed or further info. I thanks the hard work of our Epuni children to keep their field of flowers alive and flourishing, and much love too to the children of Pomare School, St Michael’s and Taita Central who all came together with us to create this planting.