Whakamaru School
Planting the awesome Matariki garden
Can you spot our coordinator, Rachel, amongst the tamariki?
Great leadership skills shown by these boys!
We had done a riparian planting with Whakamaru School in Mokai in 2024, but in 2025 we were very excited to plant with them on their school grounds for the first time. We worked with every class at the school, teaching about the importance of our special native plants to our native birds, bugs, and lizards. Then, thanks to First Credit Union funding, we put 95 plants into the whenua. The school already had some pretty cool native plantings, but they had a few gaps, so we decided that rather than starting another new area, we would revamp the ones that they already had.
We filled their front gardens with native ground covers and shrubs, then we added more native trees to the restoration planting on their school field, and finally we planted grasses, flaxes and tīkōuka in their beautiful Matariki planting around the nine large tānekaha representing the nine stars of the Matariki cluster.
The leadership shown by the older boys was amazing. They dug the holes for the juniors and helped them to plant. They were wonderful tuakana. It was awesome to see the rangatahi having such a sense of pride and ownership of their kura grounds. What a fantastic school for tamariki and for wildlife!
Super excited to get the trapline back in action!
While planting at Whakamaru School we noticed lots of trap boxes hidden around the grounds. They looked like they hadn't been used for a while. We finished all our planting with a bit of time to spare, so we suggested that we set up the trapline again. The kids were super keen and ran off to bring in all the boxes. They were finding them all over the place! We cleaned them up, gave them a bit of maintenance, and reset them.
The tamariki got a lesson on how to set traps, putting them the right way around and nearer the back of the box. They put peanut butter in the trap, on the top of the box, and in the doorway to lure rats in. They learnt to ‘think like a rat’ and put them where they think a rat would run, along edges by bushes or walls. They learnt to make sure it was stable, as wobbly traps put rats off entering. Then the made sure the rat could see all the way through and scuffed the soil around the entrance way to use the smell of fresh soil as a lure.
We can't wait to hear how their trapline goes! Good luck!
