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Kids Edible Gardens project - Christchurch, New Zealand
Kids Edible Gardens began 3 years ago in Christchurch, New Zealand. Its focus is to facilitate organic gardening in primary schools for the benefit of the wider community, with the aim that organic gardening be a component of the Primary curriculum and environmental education. With the school classes, KEGs creates and maintains organic vegetable, fruit and herb gardens in the school grounds; the principles of organic gardening and Permaculture are taught throughout the year by our Garden Facilitators.
At present, there are 11 schools in Christchurch who employ a Garden Facilitator, and 14 others who have been involved with the project in the past, by having had gardens created and facilitated by our team. We also run compost workshops, give worm talks and are involved in running holiday programmes. We have a yearlong programme based on the seasons, which is now detailed in our comprehensive resource 'A Growing Guide for Teachers'. The idea is that the school communities become involved from the beginning so that after we have facilitated for the first year they can take over their garden project themselves. This allows us to start the project with new schools and skills and knowledge are passed on to the communities.
The schools grow all sorts of edible plants from carrots to cucumbers, tomatoes to thyme, raspberries to rhubarb! We also grow some Asian vegetables such as bok choi, mizuna, and traditional Maori vegetables such as kumara, which is like a sweet potato. The kids also learn about edible weeds like fat hen, dandelion and clover, and edible native plants like the Totara berry.
Each school makes its own compost from food scraps and green waste from the school grounds, and we make our own stinky fertilisers from seaweed or comfrey!
At one school recently we have made lots of cloches to protect the seedlings from the hard frosts that we get in Christchurch. They made the mini cloches from plastic drink bottles cut in half - a good way to recycle and help the garden at the same time!
Another school will soon be setting up a worm farm in an old bath that one of the parents was throwing out - all the food scraps from lunches can be thrown into the bath and the juice drips nicely out of the plug hole!
We will soon have our own website, so you can learn about us in more detail but until then if you would like to contact any schools in New Zealand, please contact
Kids' Edible Gardens
PO Box 327
Christchurch
New ZealandEmail:
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All content © HDRA Page last updated 19 June, 2006 |
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