Kitchen Garden
I am very excited to be involved in leading the Kitchen Garden Program this year, although it's certainly always a team effort, especially since I'm only at school one day a week!
The other staff, students and community members help keep things ticking along in between.
We are lucky to have support from the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation, and are also getting some much appreciated extra support from local businesses and community. We are currently setting up a new Kitchen storage area where our equipment for the cooking and eating part of the program can be kept.
The aim of the Kitchen Garden Program is to equip children with the skills to grow, harvest, prepare and share fresh, affordable and culturally diverse food, enabling them to develop positive food, wellbeing and sustainability skills for life, through a fun, hands on approach.
The program requires regular physical energy as the students dig holes, weed and plant, build supporting structures, push wheelbarrows, shovel compost and so on. It teaches specific skills, such as how to work safely with tools, knives and fire, it engages all the senses, it delivers increased self-esteem and respect for the earth, and it requires co-operative endeavour. At the same time, the Program offers rich and varied links with curriculum- environmental science, science in general, insect life, water management, art & design, literacy, numeracy, and respect for cultural differences, to name just a few.
Getting back after the Summer holidays and pretty harsh, dry weather, parts of the garden were looking a bit sad, so first term will be reinvigorating our patch and planting some Autumn/Winter vegetables, as well as a sensory garden bed.
In the first three weeks we have harvested potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, mulberries and pulled out lots of weeds. We've moved our worm farm to a shady spot and been feeding and watering it, producing rich Worm Tea for the garden.
* If anyone has some small, empty glass bottles with lids (eg. apple cider vinegar or similar) we would love some to bottle our worm juice in.
We have also been preparing the chook shed for the arrival of our new chooks, hopefully next week, who will provide us with eggs for our cooking lessons. We are very grateful to Hamilton Produce, who will sponsor us by providing our layer pellets for the chooks.
In week 1, the Prep- 2 class made delicious muffins with fresh apricots.
Week 2 saw the Grades 3-5 students use our harvest to create very popular Potato and Rosemary pizzas!
This week we harvested some zucchini and the grade 1&2s baked zucchini slice, which made a perfect, healthy after school snack.
The Grades 3-5 worked hard in the garden, digging over a very dry garden area preparing it for our sensory garden, building bamboo tripods to support our bean seedlings, and propogating rosemary cuttings.
If anyone has an excess of garden produce at home that you don't know what to do with, we would happily try to use them in our kitchen cooking activities. Just contact the school or me personally ( 0438 229 444) and we will see if we can make use of it.
We would also appreciate donations of well rotted manure or straw (for mulch or in chook shed), if you have it, but please contact us first in case we already have enough.
Even though we have lovely, small group sizes, sometimes the use of tools requires very close supervision of one or two students while the others are doing other jobs. For this reason, I would welcome occasional extra help from family or community members. Anyone who assists will be required to have a Working With Children Check. If you are interested in helping out our delightful students in either the garden or kitchen occasionally, please let me know of your availability and we can see if I can slot you in.
Thank you,
Susan Bell