Eco-topia living classroom workshop

Eco-topia in October 2012, Sydney Australia
Growing food • transforming place • creating culture
...celebrating community one lettuce at a time
5th ACFCGN National School & Community Garden Gathering

Edible School Gardens — the living classroom workshop

Leonie’s session will give an overview of the different schools I have been involved in and how she runs the edible school gardens program showing a powerpoint of all the different steps involved in the 12 month program.  She will talk about how to get started – who are going to be the support team,  what works and what doesn’t,  how to transform that piece of dirt into a vibrant healthy edible garden. The language you might use to get kids attention.  How to source materials.  Different types of gardens to create, growing food for health,  and gardening towards sustainability.

Participant will look at the games to play to reinforce the learning in the garden and to make our sessions a fun place.

About Leonie

If you want to know anything about the use of school food gardens in education—ask Leonie. Why? Because she’s one of the most experienced people when it comes to the outdoor classroom… the classroom in the garden.

A master—or is it mistress?—of creating order and learning from the chaos of children in the garden, Leonie will share her experience and learnings with us at Eco-topia, and those attending her sessions will be able to create their own ecotopia in their school grounds. It’s the chance to learn from one of Australia’s most accomplished practitioners of the arcane art of educational food gardens in school grounds.

Leonie’s passion…

Leonie is passionate about childrens health and growing food that has come from soil that is full of life. In 90’s she studied horticulture, then went on to study permaculture and organics.  With this knowledge in hand she decided to be pro-active and go into schools and teach children about growing and eating fresh food and started her own business called  Edible School Gardens.

Edible School Gardens follows the principles of permaculture; Care of the Earth, Care of the People and Sharing of surplus.  Their program is totally focussed on students learning the skills required to design, set up and grow food.  They learn about recycling and sourcing goods locally to reduce our environmental impact, costs and support local communities.  Healthy soils is the key to producing our abundant food – healthy soil – healthy plants – healthy kids/people.

Leonie suggest that we need to share this information and learn from each other so we can all have thriving edible gardens in schools, community gardens and home.

Sunshine Coast school gardens flourishing…

Leonie has been running edible school gardens programs since 2001 and have set up 20+ schools with the program on the Sunshine Coast. I am also been involved with community gardens and currently involved with setting one up. She has published Eat Your Garden a book about organic gardening for home and schools which gives clear instructions on how to work through all the process required for setting up organic gardening, soil building etc to produce the healthiest food possible, it also includes planting guides and techniques.

Leonie has also recently produced a DVD titled Edible School Gardens, the film crew followed her around for 18 months filming all the processes involved with setting up edible gardens at school from design to setting up, composting, planting etc to the joys of harvesting it.

Over the years Leonie has received several awards, twice receiving awards from the Living Smart Glossies Award recognising her dedication to and professionalism in permaculture education and advocacy for edible school gardens.