Watermelons, ladybirds and fine feasts

Date posted: 31 March 2016

Aand the Little Sprouts Kitchen Garden Visiting Program is off and racing for 2016, with the first session taking place on 15 March with some little legends from Modbury Kindergarten!

Watermelon bliss

One of the highlights from classes so far has been the opportunity to harvest watermelons from the garden to make watermelon and mint smoothies (YUM). This has been so popular with the kids that many have remarked they’d be bugging mum and dad to start making them at home!

Fine feasts

Term 1’s program has also included kids planting peas and snow peas in biodegradable pots to take back and add to their school or kindergarten’s kitchen garden. Kids have also been harvesting plants from the kitchen garden, including capsicum, chilli, eggplants and herbs, to take back to their school or kindergarten, where they’ve been using the produce to prepare healthy (and delicious) recipes.

Ladybird love

Ladybirds are appearing in the Garden in huge numbers – a very welcome sight! Ladybirds feed on soft-bodied insects so they serve as beneficial predators of plant pests such as scale insects, white flies, mites and aphids.

Ladybird larvae (what the ladybirds look like just after they hatch their eggs, pictured) can eat pests by the hundreds. A hungry ladybird can devour 50 aphids per day! Keep an eye out for a future video featuring more of the curious critters found in the Little Sprouts Kitchen Garden. Until next time!