Concord School First year of our Kitchen Garden Journey Teacher: Jane Stacey

Our school We are a special school located in the Northern Region of Victoria. We have over 370 students with various needs. The goal for our Food Technology program is to educate children in cooking with fresh produce, understanding the value of gardening and engaging them in a variety of kitchen and garden activities.

The hard yards The Food Technology program has been running for many years at Concord School. However, this is the first year that we have introduced a kitchen garden set up for Food Technology. It took some hard work and dedication by all students in year to get the garden started. A big thank you to the year 11 & 12 Horticulture group and our maintenance man Ken who helped with the extra difficult hands on tasks.

Students had to get their garden tool and wheelbarrow licences, build more vege boxes, top up existing boxes with soil, build our scarecrows, introduce more chickens for composting and plant our crop! It was great to get dirty! We made mosaic chicken sculptures for display in the garden to give it a dash of colour.

Slim pickings We planted many different crops. However, it turns out that we got mainly lettuce and bok choy, purple carrots that turned out to be orange and parsley to last a lifetime. We struggled to grow some plants as the weather was not forgiving – too hot!

Practice and more practice As time went on and with a lot of care for the garden we were soon harvesting and using a variety of produce from the garden in our kitchen….cabbage, carrots, spinach, turnips, capsicums…. The students were stoked! They especially loved spotting the pesky caterpillars and feeding them to the chickens.

Some money to be made Sometimes we would have enough produce to sell to parents and staff to make some money to buy supplies. The year 11 & 12 elective group “Eat Fresh” raised money by holding a Bastille Day crepe fundraiser. They sold over 100 crepes. The money raised went towards purchasing garden supplies.

In the long run Students are still working hard in the garden and are looking forward to spring planting. They are enjoying harvesting and using the produce in the kitchen. So far we have grown and used a variety of herbs, capsicum, spinach, silverbeet, lettuce, carrot, beans, cabbage, brussel sprouts, broccoli, celery, bok choy, wombok, potato, tomato, garlic (only greens so far), pumpkin, beetroot, oranges and lemons. Some students love taking the herbs home to experiment with. Other students are starting their own vege patches at home. Success!

The program is slowly adjusting the mind set of the students so that they are more aware of where food comes from and how we can use it in our cooking. The comments have changed from “What are we cooking?” to “Are we going into the garden today?”.

There are exciting times ahead as we establish and extend what we have started. We already have parents who come into the kitchen to assist with cooking. We hope that one day we can get parent helpers in our garden to get their hands dirty too. The next big job is to develop a better compost system and more sustainable recycling set up for the whole school.