Our Lady of the Rosary
Is sponsored by Queensland Gambling Community Benefit Fund
Our Lady of the Rosary, Caloundra is sponsored by Queensland
Gambling Community Benefit Fund.
July 2009 sees the start of the Edible School Gardens program at
Our Lady of the Rosary. First it we had a meeting with
teachers and interested parents to discuss the commitment
required for the program to be successful and an overview of the
year. Initially only 5 classes can be involved, so a
decision had to be made as to who would be the lucky ones.
Over July and August the students learnt about
Permaculture design and a final design evolved. I believe
that the whole program is students focused as it is their garden
and their food, not mine. In their design they wanted a
love heart in memory of one of their teachers that recently
died, and to remember others that had died. They also
wanted the shapes O L and R representing there school and a wave
shape garden, representing living near the ocean which is
important in our design to catch and store the nutrients from the
higher gardens. These are just some of the examples of the
final design.
September was very busy with one week between the finalised
design, done by the students and collecting all the products for
set up day, remembering that our Edible School Gardens are an
'instant garden make-over' all done in one day with the students
and the wider school community.
Often pre-set up can be very stressful trying to bring everything
together, but one this occasion, via our email group
communications, I had one the funniest, light-hearted weeks and
what a credit that is to the school community to have such a
friendly supportive team. On set up day they had organised
coffee at 7.30am for the earlier starters and there wonderful
tuckshop ladies cooked us (40+ people) a healthy morning tea and
lunch and provided cool drinks for us.
Set up day was wonderful, it felt like a whole of friends had
come around and helped their kids with a project. We all
worked hard with the students all day and finished everything by
the end of the day (shed and watertank being installed during the
holidays). You can watch the day, see the time-lapse on
this page.
Term 4, we have got our seedlings and herbs in and now look
forward to a harvest day later in the term. The students
are learning all about composting and why it is so
important. They have discovered that cane toads can be a
positive addition to our garden!!!!!
It has been an extremely hot, windy and dry term, so the students
have been busy, along with some Dads, working out some ways to
reduce the heat stress from our baby seedlings and seeds.
Stage 2 - 2010
2010 we had 4 classes involved with the Edible School Gardens
program from years 2-6, all the teachers were really enthusiastic
and embraced the school garden program, supporting me with my
ideas and new projects. Because of this, we achieved so
much again this year. Besides attending to our organic
gardening practices of compost, recycling garden waste and food
waste into compost and worm castings, pest control (yes just use
2 fingers to control most pest but also be mindful that not all
bugs in our garden are bad bugs, so don't squash all bugs),
planting seedings, seeds and plantings, propagate, potting up for
other schools and tasting food from the garden each
week. This has been the wettest year since I started
the Edible School Gardens program in 2001 so we spent many days
inside doing gardening activities which included games -
celebrity veg, guess what the veg is under the blanket,
veggie bingo and cooking to name a few. An important part
of the garden is cooking up the food and I would like to
congratulate Master Chef for the influence it has had on the
children desire to want to experiment with food, they love to
have "master chef salad competitions' where the class is broken
into groups and they go into the garden and invent their own
salad mix and then we discuss each mix none of them
traditional but all so crispy and mouth-watering (and definitely
original) and then we get to taste the different salads.
The highlight of the year is our Harvest Festival, this is the
2nd time we have had the festival and all classes wanted to be
involved this year that posed a new challenge for me, an event so
large approx feeding 400 students, teachers and some parents and
families, but I do like a challenge and Our Lady Of The Rosary
has an enormously supportive teacher/parent team so I was
confident that we could do it successfully. Harvest
Day
is one of the most important days of the program
because it to showcase to everyone that children will eat fresh
food if they have grown it, that we don't need disposables (we
grow arrowroot leaves for plates and buy "real' knifes, forks and
some (real) plastic plates and cups etc from Op Shops), we share
and we work as a community. It is also a time to be
grateful for the organic food we have grown and cooked and how
lucky we are to be in Australia. There are so many unspoken
lessons in that one Harvest day. After harvest day we
discussed how much it would have cost if we brought disposable
plates, cups, forks, spoons etc and I was shocked at just how
expensive disposables are, not to mention the
environmental impact they have for many years, but with the way
we did it buying real (second hand) cups, forks etc, not only was
our money going back into the community to support those that
needed assistance but we now have Harvest Box Supplies for all
the other times we have festivities. Many lessons.
Leading up to harvest day, the students put signs up around the
garden asking people to not eat any food from it as we needed it
for our harvest day. Classes started making recycled
decorations, creating dances and songs. We had a team of
Mums that took control of the menu for the day we had no kitchen
facilities due to new building work, so we had to organise 12
workstations around the school with approx 120 students preparing
food for the whole school and community of around 400. Good
planning equals success and that it was. The teachers
and students also decided they wanted to dress up for the day, so
we ran a competition for the best "Little Leonie' and the best
"Costa'. The day was a buzz from the second the
students arrived all getting into the spirit of the
day. I think that day was the only day it
hadn't rained that week, a good sign. Teachers had already
placed all the tents up around the oval before school started and
Mums were busy in the staff room sorting out recipe
ingredients, I was in the garden with students and parents
harvesting all the food for our feast - such a hive of
activity and all before 9am. All the food from the garden
had to be washed and then distributed to relevant recipes.
Students were allotted their workstation and parents assisted
students with creating the recipes, it seemed to take no time at
all and all cooking was completed. Then it was celebration
time songs, dancing and judging of the "Little Leonie and Costa'
look-alikes, there were so many good copies.
The food was distributed evenly between the 8 tables on the oval
and with all the food (all vegetarian) set out it looked
like a rainbow the colours were so enticing. I was very
proud of the students as they tried and ate so much of the food
which they had either been involved with growing, or had
experienced the progress of the garden “ there was real pride and
ownership and of course - I was the proudest person there.
I am extremely grateful to the Qld Gambling Community Benefit
Fund for sponsoring this program and making a difference to so
many students eating habits and turning a bare dirt patch into a
productive organic garden for students to eat from. There
is so little funding out there to support these programs of
independent School Garden Programs/workers, and Qld Gambling
Community Benefit Fund took that risk to fund us and we are
pleased to say, it has been incredibly successful.
I also run Parent Basic Organic Gardening classes on a Sunday at
the school to give parents a better understanding of our
garden at school, what their children were talking about to them,
and to inspire the family to garden at home.
Having been at OLR for 18 months now, I get many stories from the
parents about how the garden has changed the eating habits of
their children to a much healthier and more varied one.
This to me is the driving force of why I work with children to
make a healthier difference to their lives.
Our Lady of Rosary 2011
The summer of 2010/11 was unseasonally wet -, wetter than a
normal wet season. During winter 2010, having suffered a
long drought, we changed the garden slightly to redirect any run
off from pathways and seating areas into our garden to conserve
and hold any rain water that came our way. That all changed
over summer and a massive amount of rain not only fell on most
days but poured most of summer and the garden did suffer but not
as much as I had feared. The fruit trees at the bottom of
our garden didn’t cope with constant wet feet but the rest of the
garden did hold its ground and wasn’t washed down the hill.
The garden was depleted of nutrients due to so much rain and it
was a priority to feed up the garden again and to redirect water
away from the garden as more wet weather is still forecasted
through to next year, so we have built a trench up the top of the
garden where most of the water runs down our woodchip pathways
(looks like a river when it rains) and in this trench we have
planted arrowroot to help soak up some of the water plus to have
a living fence.
In
March we had to start planting, but it wasn’t ideal conditions
and under normal circumstance we wouldn’t have planted, but we
were preparing for a very special gardening personality to visit,
Costa Georgiadis from SBS Costa Garden Odyssey was coming to look
at our Edible School Garden. Everywhere we dug a hole to
plant a seedling there was a puddle of water in that hole!!!
‘Sorry seedling we aren’t trying to drown you but we need you to
grow’, thankfully the seedling, even though not planted under
ideal conditions and still more rain, they
grew.
The school was so excited to have Costa come to visit, they
dressed up again as Costas’ or Little Leonie and prepared lunch
from our garden for selected students, parents and
teachers. When Costa arrived he spoke to the whole school
assembly speaking about how he came to be a gardener, the
positive influence his grandfather had on his life and the joy
his work brings to him. Costa also entertained students and
teachers with stories of filming for SBS Costas Garden
Odyssey and the many retakes required to get that
prefect story. The judging of the best Costa and
Little Leonie was awarded and students lead Costa through their
Edible School Garden with every child having a story for him,
eventually the students let Costa have some lunch, beautifully
prepared by Stephanie and her team. Costa visit was so well
received by the whole school community and every student wanted
his autograph and photograph with him. Thank you Costa for
visiting our Edible School Gardens at Our Lady of the Rosary and
enjoying it as we did, the autographed photos that the students
and teachers received will be treasured by them.
The new addition to our garden are the Chooks, yes we now have a
chicken house and 7 loved chickens, the students adore them and
the chickens actually look forward to the students coming to
visit them, the chooks hear the students coming for lunchbreak
and the chooks wait for the students at the gate, so beautiful to
watch and they are much loved and cuddled.
Around the school other classes have taken the initiative to
create their own vegetable gardens, there are now 3 new
vegetables gardens in different areas in the school and I’m so
proud of them as they haven’t asked me to help them, they have
created it all themselves and they are thriving.
We are now preparing for more fruit trees, this time they will be
raised and on higher ground. We are currently preparing the
soil in anticipation of their arrival next term.
Newsletter:
May 2011