Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden 

Sonia Nista 

Kitchen Specialist

Bianca Tondo 

Garden Specialist

Welcome back to The Patch Café!

The students have returned to the kitchen full of excitement and can’t wait to get back to preparing and sharing together this year. 

We have begun by taking a walk through the garden to see how it has flourished in the sunshine over the summer break, then going through our all-important knife/tool rules and kitchen rules. This refresher covers knife techniques and hygiene guidelines for when preparing in the kitchen. 

Our year 3 students have now begun their own SAKG journey this week and started learning the 3 knife techniques that we use in the kitchen. For extra practice they made and enjoyed fresh fruit salad cups.

Over the coming weeks the kitchen/garden will be a buzz as we prepare for a visit from The Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation, together with their ambassadors from Coles (and a very exciting special guest) for a photoshoot at Kingswood Primary School. This is a wonderful opportunity for our school and community and celebrates 10 years of delivering pleasurable food education. Stay tuned to find out who our mystery guest will be!

Welcome back to the SAKG garden for 2023. I hope everyone had a restful holiday. 

One of our school values is that we thrive in a team culture. I would like to send a huge thank you to Jason, Agata, Qing, Miyuki and Robbies families for helping me look after the hens over the school holidays. You all did a wonderful job. 

Have you walked to the back of the school to see our summer vegetables in full bloom? If not, I encourage you to go and have a look, with your child. Students planted seeds during the wet spring weather, which successfully grew into seedlings. In December those seedlings where then planted into our new garden beds. We now have huge zucchini plants, corn, tomatoes, and cucumbers growing. We also have squash, basil, and beans ready to be harvested. The pumpkins are also growing nicely behind the grade 2 portables as well. 

With the larger garden beds comes greater harvest from the garden. Keep an eye out for market stalls at the front of the school on a Monday afternoon in coming weeks. Freshly harvested, organic fruits and vegetables will be for sale at a bargain price. The money raised from selling our harvest goes back into the program to purchase more seedlings. The money is also used to look after our hens, who are soon in need of a new hen house. 

Keep an eye our for some beautiful sunflowers that are about to bloom this week around the school. Hopefully we can admire their beauty before the cockatoos come down and eat them first!

Looking forward to seeing you all around the school and in the kitchen garden program in 2023.