Students give a fig about gardening

It’s not very often you see secondary school teens munching snappy fresh beans and delicious ripe figs direct from a school garden, but that’s exactly what’s happening at Craigmore High School.

Students at the school, which is in the northern Adelaide suburb of Blakeview, have been discovering the joys of growing and harvesting their own produce through their own kitchen garden.

The project started last year and is being run by two passionate staff members – School Services Officer Kim Nys and Home Economics and Art Teacher Emma Campbell.

Kim and Emma said the idea to start a school garden had been brewing for several years – beginning as a plan to grow herbs to supplement the produce used in the school’s existing Home Economics program.

The school joined the Foundation’s new Kitchen Garden Classroom membership in May last year, which they said gave them the confidence to bring their plans to life.

Kim and Emma attended training with the Foundation in 2015 at Adelaide’s Blair Athol North School, an established Kitchen Garden Program School, and came back full of inspiration.

“The training was fantastic and really interesting. We came back thinking ‘we want that!’ We want a garden like them, we want a pizza oven!” they said.

Kim and Emma said after attending the training their small idea to grow herbs snowballed into a much bigger plan.

The kitchen garden project was lucky enough to inherit an area of the school garden that had been landscaped over four years by Year 11 and 12 students, who were completing a course that gave literacy and numeracy a practical application.

The large garden – almost a quarter of an acre in size – features fish ponds, a barbecue area, seating, a creek bed and an array of established fruit trees growing plums, figs, lemons and limes.

After adding four raised veggie beds they had their kitchen garden, and set up a gardening group with about 15 students – mostly from Year 9.

The students, who volunteered to be part of the group, have one lesson a week in the garden and have been busy tending to herbs, zucchinis, beans, lettuces and melons in recent months.

“There’s a core group that have been there since day one and they just love it,” Kim and Emma said.

They said the gardening group was encouraging the students to develop a positive attitude to discovering new foods, and a willingness to try them.

“We’ve had kids who won’t try new foods in Home Ec classes, but they will try it when they have grown it and picked it from the garden themselves,” they said.

“They loved eating the figs straight from the tree, as it was something many of them had never tried before.”

The students have also been eagerly eating strawberry guavas, plums and beans fresh from the garden.

“Most of the time, with the beans, they eat them straight on the spot,” they said.

Students also took some of the excess plums home to share with family members and make jam.

Kim and Emma said some of the students in the group gardened at home with their families, but many of the students didn’t have any gardening experience.

Those students who have gardens at home had also been inspired to bring in plants to add to the school garden.

But it’s not just the food growing in the garden that has been exciting the students … “They also love seeing the nature in the garden and got very excited about a praying mantis they found. It’s not very often you see a Year 9 girl excited about a praying mantis,” Kim and Emma said.

Once the garden is established, and producing more fruit and vegetables, the school hopes to start cooking classes with the students and to integrate the kitchen garden project into the Year 8 & 9 curriculum.

The school will utilise its established kitchen, which is used for Home Economics classes with Years 8–12 students.

Kim, who looks after all the food ordering for the school, said they had already been able to supplement the Home Ec food supplies with fresh herbs from the garden.

Kim and Emma said they had big plans for the garden and had involved the students in the planning process all the way along.

“Last year we sat them down, gave them pieces of paper and asked them to draw what they would like in the garden.”

“We’re really trying to give them ownership of this project.”

Next on the wishlist is a greenhouse made from recycled plastic bottles and, down the track, maybe that pizza oven …

This story originally appeared in the May 2016 edition of Education Matters Secondary magazine.