Creating a kitchen garden at a local school

I am now the proud ‘grandmother’ of twenty kindergarten children at Katoomba Public School. Each Friday at noon (weather permitting) I turn up at the school, hopefully with dear friend Sue (Girard) in tow, to add a bit more to a steadily growing garden, carefully chosen for its closeness to the classroom and its north east aspect. We work with four at a time for about fifteen minutes, while the others do a Round Robin set of activities inside.

The first bed was built on top of the kikuyu, following Rowe Morrow's great diagram. The children helped at very stage – deciding what vegetables (and fruit) they liked to eat, talking about whether they would grow in Katoomba, marking out the first bed, wetting and laying the newspaper, adding a layer of lucerne hay, then a layer of almost compost (they enjoyed identifying the various vegetable remains although a few didn't want to touch or smell them), then a layer of straw and wetting it thoroughly.

Finally we made holes for pockets of good soil, and each child sowed two peas or beans or planted a potato seedling or a lettuce. Then they added tags with their unsteadily printed names. I explained that some might die or be eaten (just as well, for by the next week the slugs had found two of the lettuce - we put in a substitute straight away in each case).

We talked about the difference between the fresh peas and beans that we eat and the dried-up peas and bean-pods that we use to get new plants. The most dramatic moment was opening up some dried old pods of Scarlet Runner beans to reveal the delicately coloured beans inside. We sowed them even out of season just to see what happened.

As the peas grew we attached them to tripods, and we also gave all the plants a dose of Charlie Carp (after a smell of the bottle). We also had to weed out the wheat as it grew out of the straw, and keep pulling back the kikuyu. The name tags haven’t worked very well because some names have washed off – even though we used what I thought were the right markers. Any ideas?

We have now added a wall of bubble-wrap on the south east of the bed (it's protected to the west by the school building), after talking about how plants get cold in winter too. And we are just about to make our second bed, with two keyhole sections. This time we'll have to cut off the kikuyu around the edge and then pull out all the runners. Great fun, as long as the ground isn't too wet. Then I'll give it a bit of a hoe, and we'll sow a row of carrots and some rainbow chard - we have already looked at the seeds (brought by Sue).

I expected them to be interested in the physical gardening activities such as planting, watering and seeing the plants grow (of course a few just like being outside), but I have been excited by the interest some of the children also have in what might be called the intellectual element in the exercise – the why, why not and how? One of these children is not quite five.

We've already had other teachers wanting to have a similar garden, and the P & C have agreed to raise money for hay, straw etc, so all we need is some volunteers. Of course we could do something similar at other schools as well. The project is part of the just established Katoomba-Leura Climate Action Now group, which hopes to consolidate the activities of various local groups.

Let me know if you would like to join us, grandmother or grandfather or auntie or uncle. Everyone welcome to what could become an active network. From little things big things grow.

Lizzie Connor