QECSN Network Newsletter Book Review

Eat Your Garden: Organic Gardening for Home & Schools is a truly beautiful book that through comprehensive practical information underpinned by the vision, "To develop edible gardens within school communities that will encourage healthy eating habits" (p11) is guar-anteed to inspire you and ensure a productive organic garden for you and the children within your setting.

Leonie Shanahan brings to the authorship of this little gem a background in Permaculture and Organic gardening coupled with her own very successful initiative, the Edible School Gardens program. The book is extremely user friendly and covers a wide range of topics such as companion gardening, no dig gardens, com-post, bush food, garden design, planting, seed saving, worm farms and a fantastic calendar which outlines the jobs that need to be attended to in the garden and a planting guide. Leonie's extensive experience in working with schools to develop a community garden project has informed each of these topics (along with many more), the information and suggestions in Eat Your Garden reflect the wide range of possibilities for establishing and expanding an organic garden in a child focussed setting.

There are two things about this book that make it a stand out for educators, particularly educators in Queensland. The first is an appreciation of working with children in the garden, their capacity to take responsibility for a community garden and therefore to have a genuine role in cultivating, harvesting and importantly eating the produce from the garden. The second is in-formation that is context specific to the sub-tropics & mountain/ highland areas of Queensland.

To preview sections of Leonie Shanahan's book, Eat Your Garden or to learn more about Leonie's initiatives, programs and vision for edible gardens within school communities visit the informative Edible School Gar-dens website: http://www.edibleschoolgardens.com.au/

downloadable: "Volume 1, Issue 3" pdf
September 2010 QECSN Network Newsletter
QECSN Queensland Early Childhood Sustainability Network