School Garden Report May 2010
Over the past four years Slow Food Noosa
has sponsored four school kitchen gardens in our local area.
These include:
- Noosaville State School,
- Peregian Beach College,
- Cooran State School and
- Sunshine Beach State School.
These gardens have been set up with the assistance of Leonie
Shanahan from Edible School Gardens using the principles
of permaculture.
These garden have provided an invaluable focus for school
communities and involve students, parents, teachers, tuck
shops and visitors to the schools. They have been hugely
successful at educating children about the joys of gardening
and the pleasures of eating food that has been grown from
seed, watered, tendered and harvested.
Children also learn about water management, recycling and
composting.
Some of our Slow Food chefs and members have been involved
with many of the Harvest Days and children have learnt to
cook stir fries, use mortars and pestles, prepare salads,
set and decorate tables and enjoy the social aspects of
shared dining.
A recent report from Leonie states “Cooran State
School is absolutely thriving, all students from the whole
school, garden each fortnight when I’m there and we
are now teaching the teachers about gardening so that they
are comfortable with taking the program over later in the
year. I have at least 2 parent volunteers with me each week.
We have divided the garden up so that each class is responsible
for their own area; the herb spiral, bananas, composts,
worms and potatoes are the ‘common’ areas. The
tuckshop is using the produce and giving us scraps in return!!!
The students are eating from the garden each week and last
week one of the activities was ‘set the table’
with tablecloth, serviettes and 2 course meal, that was
an interesting activity.”
 |
The cost of an Edible School Garden program is $12 000
for 12 months which establishes a garden that can be self
sufficient and run by the school as an ongoing project.
Slow Food Noosa contributes half of this amount with the
rest provided by the school.
Slow Food Noosa is keen to provide financial support to
any school that would like to participate in this program
and interested parties can contact
Katrina Ryan on 5448 3322.
|
