Sustainabilty

Hello everyone! 

Gardening Club

We were especially lucky with parent helpers last Thursday with both Rob Nguyen (Charlie and Frankie’s Dad) and Melvyn Colaso (Liv’s Grandpa) so we got some great heavy work done. 

We had a lovely donation of heritage tomato seedlings from Sustainable Macloed. Paul and Robin handpicked some really interesting varieties for us, that they thought our students would especially enjoy. We planted Honey Drop (beautiful golden teardrop shaped) , and Fahrenheit Blue (purple/blue cherry tomatoes), Pink Bumblebee and Tommy Toe varieties! Our students will look after them throughout the rest of this term and four lucky families will take them home for the Summer, to enjoy the delicious tomatoes! You can read more about the great work Sustainable Macleod do here https://sustainablemacleod.org.au/

We also did some planning for how to save our lemon tree, which needs replanting to its own bed and started planning a working bee to start a Junior students’ garden area. 

Stay tuned for Working Bee details! 

Today we gave our worms a good feed and found so many new tiny baby worms! We learned how to mulch around our new tomato plants and how to stake them so they will not fall over as they grow.

Parent Volunteers

We would love parent volunteers to help us in the garden. If you are available on either an occasional or regular basis Miss Belinda would love to hear from you.  Email bnechwatal@tcs.catholic.edu.au. We meet Thursdays 10.45-11.35am. Volunteers need to have a Working With Children Check. There are also jobs that can be done at any time, for example if someone knows how to best prune lemon trees, your experience would be very welcome. 

We need another planter box made for our garden area. Is there anyone in the school community who has the skills to do this? Please contact Mr Rodrigues if you may be able to help.

Volunteers who can gently water our vegetable garden, are very welcome on days other than the Thursday (we water on Thursday when Miss Belinda is here) - especially while our seedlings are so small. The vegetable gardens are located just outside the library, near the Prep and 1/2 classrooms. There are also four new tomatoes outside the library door. 

Students are welcome to use their water bottles or just ask Mrs Boffa in the office for the key to the shed to get a watering can. Our plants would really appreciated it! 

Nude Food - Every Thursday

And the winners are … 5/6FA with 16 and 1/2RT with 12 rubbish free lunches - Well done. 

Why do we do Nude Food? 

Did you know that in Australia, the average child makes around 30 kg of rubbish a year through their school lunches? In fact, Australia is the second highest producer of rubbish per person in the western world! We can do our part to reduce this by packing a school lunch without including any extra packaging or juice packs. Make a conscious decision to only include foods that leave no packaging at the end of the day. Put the sandwich or bread roll into a named lunchbox and use small containers for any snack foods and of course, pack a reusable drink bottle. 

Some yummy ideas - a sandwich/wrap/roll, pasta with vegetables, soup, frittata or sushi, a fruit or vegetable snack, such as whole fruit, cut up veggie sticks, fruit or savoury kebab or a small salad. 

There are some great ideas here:

Healthy Lunchbox Ideas for kids. Rubbish free / nude food ideas

Have a great week everyone! Thanks for your great efforts in helping us live in a way that is kinder to our environment!

The Sustainability Team - Ms Belinda, Amy and Nathan