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East Tamaki Primary
students in their garden.
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growing
Maths, spelling and now gardening
– three Auckland schools are discovering the
benefits of learning to grow and cook food,
as Melinda Williams explains.
There is no shortage of greenery at Meadowbank School
in Auckland, it’s packed onto two sites strung together by a bridge
across a tree-lined gully. But the last 12 months have seen a frenzy
of new planting, and planning for even more gardens. Every spare
patch of dirt or vessel capable of holding some – spare tyres, old
recycling bins, cut-down juice bottles, buckets – have been put to
service growing fruit and vegetables for the school’s burgeoning
Garden to Table programme.
Modelled on Australian chef Stephanie Alexander’s highly
successful Kitchen Garden scheme across the Tasman, the
programme aims to introduce 7-10 year olds to the pleasures and
life-long benefits of learning to grow and cook their own food.
The New Zealand version is led by Dish Editorial Director Catherine
Bell, who says changing family patterns means many children are
missing out on basic skills.
“We know that a lot of kids don’t sit down around the table and
eat dinner with their families these days, and that crosses a lot of
socio-economic groups.”
Concerned the vital skills of growing and cooking fruits and
vegetables had skipped a generation and could be lost forever, in
2008 Catherine began rallying together members to form the trust,
recruit pilot schools and start fundraising.
The Garden to Table Trust launched the programme at three pilot
schools in Auckland – Meadowbank School, East Tamaki Primary
and Peninsula School – at the beginning of 2009.
East Tamaki Primary was the first school to get the programme
running, as they had existing vegetable gardens. Today, with extra
Photography by Mark Heaslip
planting done by volunteers, children and staff, the gardens boast
an extensive range of fruits, herbs and vegetables: spinach, silver
beet, carrots, lettuce, cabbages, leeks, taro, broad beans, rocket,
broccoli, bok choy, thyme, rosemary, asparagus, peas, spring
onions, strawberries, feijoas, citrus fruits and courgettes are just a
few of the seasonally changing varieties. A small greenhouse is used
to incubate seedlings, and a fat scarecrow in a check shirt keeps an
eye on proceedings.
The decile one school has had substantial support from the local
community and volunteers, says Catherine. “Some of the pub
charities out in East Tamaki have been very generous. That has
helped them raise money towards their kitchen classroom, which is
the biggest and most difficult aspect of the programme for schools
to implement.”
On the day Dish visited, members of the local Freemasons Society
were visiting to hand over a cheque for a further $3000 in support
of the project, and see the students work in the gardens and
prepare a meal. On the menu were cheese scones, vegetable
bundles of broccoli, rainbow chard and carrot wrapped in noodles,
and a ‘Salad of Our Imagination’, featuring red cabbage, carrot,
broad beans and lettuces.
Children in red aprons enthusiastically chopped, steamed and
kneaded, or laid out tables with jars of fresh flowers, some from the
organic companion planting scheme in the gardens. Jim, a retired
local market gardener who volunteers almost every day, directed
students on digging in new seedlings in the garden, while other
children scattered pieces of fruit to attract birds that clear the
gardens of bugs.
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Pizza oven at Meadowbank School.
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Children at East Tamaki Primary and Meadowbank School spend a morning each week planting and tending their school gardens.
They harvest what they have grown and then cook a meal to share together.
In December the school starts a substantial refit of their former
hall kitchen, to create the kitchen classroom that will service the
needs of the programme in the long-term. Their focus for next
year is increasing the community outreach of the programme,
says principal Sarah Mirams.
Over at Meadowbank School, associate principal Carleen White
says the Garden to Table scheme has dovetailed perfectly with the
school’s existing environmental programmes. “For several years
the school has looked at how environmental principles can be
integrated into what we do every day,” she says.
This year, the students have looked at growing and cooking from
the perspectives of sustainability, design, technology and global
culture, developing gardens from the planning stage through to
building the gardens, greenhouse, hydroponic system and a pizza
oven using recycled materials, and cooking meals using ingredients
from different cultures.
“We know that a lot of kids don’t
sit down around the table
and eat dinner with their families
these days, and that crosses a lot
of socio-economic groups.”
“The children are really engaged with it,” says Carleen. “It’s
interactive, meaningful, co-operative, and they get to be outdoors.
They are loving it. We’ve had fantastic feedback from parents too.
They tell us their kids are trying foods they wouldn’t touch before,
like silver beet.”
At Peninsula School in Te Atatu, principal Grant Hope-Ede says
2009 has seen the groundwork laid for the programme to get
going fully next year. “We have four raised garden beds ready to
plant and part-planted, and the garden is going to be planted fully
next week,” he says. “The stage is set for exciting developments.
Our students have learned about garden set-up and worm farms
and composts have been started. Sustainability has become an
important word and concept.”
Next year he hopes to have the full Garden to Table kitchen
and garden programmes underway as soon as the food can be
harvested. “Next year we hope the gardens will crop nearly all
year, and we aim to have parents who have volunteered to work
in the gardens fully involved.”
“Each school develops differently – no two schools will ever be the
same in the way they run the programme,” says Catherine Bell.
“We needed to know the schools were going to be able to adapt
it to suit themselves.”
Over the last year, the Trust has raised around $85,000, which has
helped provide programme infrastructure at all three schools, and
currently pays the salaries of a part-time kitchen specialist and
garden specialist at Meadowbank and East Tamaki. “That says to
me that we’ve made fantastic progress in the last three terms,”
wsays Catherine.
The Garden to Table Trust is now officially affiliated with the
Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation, which has
been operating in Australia for eight years, and will eventually
have programmes running in 300 schools across the country.
The relationship gives the New Zealand schools access to the
considerable wealth of materials and website resources already
generated by the Australian sister project.
It hasn’t been easy, says Catherine, but the results so far and future
potential make it all worthwhile. “We had no idea what we had
taken on when we started! But we're really pleased that we’ve
done it – and we couldn’t have done it without all the other people
involved, of course. It was something that we felt really passionate
about. It’s our greatest hope that the government will see the
potential in this programme and agree to fund it for all primary
schools, as has happened in Australia.”
For more information visit garden2table.co.nz
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