Young Farmers Garden Diary: The Changing Season
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Welcome to the Young Farmers Garden Diary
We recently teamed up with Young Farmers, a local rural daycare in Kumeū, and gifted them an 8x10ft glasshouse for their centre garden. Supporting our community means a lot to us, and there's nothing better than giving the tamariki a place to get their hands in the soil, grow their own food and learn where it really comes from.
Over the next 12 months, Abby from Young Farmers will share a monthly update on what the tamariki are growing, what they're learning and how the garden changes with the seasons. We'll let Abby take it from here.
Changing seasons in the children's garden. The dawn sunrise in September is beginning to spill over into longer days, and the daylight hours are getting long enough for seeds to spark into life, growing from one small kākano into a tipu. It's the miraculous process everyone in the garden enjoys.
The equinox greets us this month and is the tipping point from winter into the hope and joy of lengthening sunlight hours and sunnier summer days.
Equi means equal and nox means night: equal night. We tend to think of it as equal hours of sunlight and moonlight, and it marks the start of a new growing season.
With the help of a new glasshouse from The Greenhouse Company NZ, we managed to spark off the growing season earlier this month. By the spring equinox our plants are looking rather lush, all tucked up in the glasshouse with warmth, moisture and nutrients, the perfect combination any young seedling needs.
The children and I have had quite the list of plants we have lovingly, carefully and tenderly sprouted into life. So far we have sown spinach, strawberry spinach, sunflowers aplenty, asparagus from the seed we collected in autumn, tomato, potato, kūmara, blue globe, virgo, honesty, strawflowers, sweet peas, lettuce, poppy, eggplant, pea sprouts, wheatgrass, microgreens, La France, snapdragons, magenta spreen, dahlias, starball, zinnia, basil and beans.
With all the showers of rain and sun, the slugs have been sliming away. It has been our most delightful and curious task to lay down wet cardboard every evening to lure the shade-loving slugs.
Every morning begins with the tamariki taking part in one of their favourite experiences in the garden: our Spring Slug Hunt! We explore how many slugs have taken shelter under the cardboard, count them, then throw them over the fence to eager chickens with breakfast in mind.
The bumblebees and bees have been busy buzzing in the broad bean patch and have officially finished pollinating the flowers.
The tamariki have been busy harvesting and processing their first beans, which were delivered to Janie's (our cook) kitchen and cooked into their lunch.
Over in the orchard the blossoms have bloomed and are now awaiting hasty pollination before the equinox winds blow them away. We'll have to wait patiently to find out if we've had any success.
From rooster crow to lamb's cry, may we meet again next month with all the delights of the changing seasons in the garden our tamariki have created.
Written by Abby Cottingham
September 2026
Check back next month for the October update from the Young Farmers garden.
Want to get your own growing season started early? Explore our glasshouses.