School Gardening Partnership 2024

August Update

St. John’s Hill school has developed an abundant and well-maintained garden. They’ve been doing plenty of in-school cooking, combining fresh grown veggies with their own eggs! It looks like they’re thoroughly enjoying themselves every step of the way, which is what we really want to see.

“Our Junior Teams have been enjoying our abundant gardens during Discovery Learning Time. At the end of Term Two, we planted our 5 raised garden beds after getting some new nutrient-rich soil. Over the last few weeks we have had a vegetable frittata, utilising the eggs from our school chooks and a large array of vege.

With three broccoli ready we had stir fried garlic broccoli and fresh celery sticks. The students loved the vibrant colours and the fresh taste.
A massive thanks goes to Springvale Garden Centre for their ongoing support of our Garden to Table learning.”

Jo, St John’s Hill School Partnership Coordinator

March – Getting Going

“We are an enviroschool and we want to keep our garden-to-table programme going throughout our school.

We value empowering students to learn to grow their own kai, especially veggies and fruit from our orchard. We look in our lunch boxes and think about where our kai comes from, who is growing it and where is it processed or distributed? Our idea is to take sustainable action and we would love to utilise your expertise to help us with our continuing journey.

This year we are establishing some new gardens due to some improvements in our playground and your donation of gardening supplies would be fantastic to get these projects up and running.”

Jo, St John’s Hill School Partnership Coordinator

School Vege Challenge 2023

Harvest Time & Judging

You can see St Johns School has been gardening for a few years now, with well established beds and routines to show. Being a part of Enviro-schools has given these guys a great head-start. There is terrific involvement from the whole school with passion and excitement from the students, teachers and parents. It’s fantastic to see food-to-table working so well here.

Mid Challenge Update

With St Johns’ being an enviro-school, they were well prepared for the challenge with an already established garden area which they were quite keen to build on. Each classroom had a garden bed dedicated to maintaining, encouraging every student to be involved in the process. Great set up with very healthy plants. Lots of variety in vegetables, as well as herbs, flowers, and the occasional native plant.

They were having trouble with weeds so we’ve recommended the use of mulch to help suppress the weeds and foster good growth.

Getting Going

We would like to take part in this challenge as we are a Green/Gold enviro school and would like to invigorate the school garden to table part of our education for sustainability that we practice at St Johns Hill School. We have been on this journey for 23 years and gained Green Gold status in 2009.
We wish to encourage and stimulate garden to table practices for our future generations that take care of our Earth in a sustainable way. As part of our EFS ethos we look at waste, composting, scraps go to our chickens and this educates students in a sustainable action.