This year the Year 3/4s have the exciting role and responsibility of leading the development of a weekly and ongoing Kitchen Garden Program at Princes Hill Primary School, including creating a productive and sustainable kitchen garden in the existing garden bed area in front of the Gym/beside the North Oval. In our first week of our Kitchen Garden journey, we considered a number of key words and what connections we had. Students chose a word that stood out to them as important and that they connected with, and shared their ideas with the group for discussion. Many students were interested in flavour and taste when they thought about food, cooking, and what learning might happen in our kitchen workshops. Teamwork came into the discussion as being important as we start on the massive challenge of developing our garden area into a productive kitchen garden where we will plant, grow, care for, and harvest vegetables and herbs to cook with. We started to map the kitchen and garden areas that we will be working in, showing all of the key features and existing conditions in detail.
This will be a year long project with the 3/4 students and teachers, and our focus over the coming weeks will be preparing the garden beds for our autumn planting. The students noted that ALOT of weeding is required. If this is something you might be able to help out with, please get in touch with Meredith (who’s in the process of organising a working bee for parent volunteers to take place during school hours in Week 4). If you have other expertise or experience in either gardening or cooking, it would be great to hear from you too! We are looking forward to building more connections within our local community as we work together to bring our Kitchen Garden Program vision to life!