Epping North Public School Garden blog

The garden’s upkeep, planting, soil turning, weeding and feeding is carried out by two environment monitors from each class (30 in all) who visit 2 – 3 times a week. This role is considered a leadership position.

Each student, in the entire school, visits the garden at least once a fortnight, with many teachers choosing to hold science lessons, such as the lifecycle of plants, within the garden.

Under the guidance of teacher/librarian Mitchell Stone, all students are encouraged to spend time and get actively involved in the garden. He says that the younger children especially, love plants they can smell and pick. So, more vegetables and herbs are on the planting list! “I’ve found these types of plants are a great stepping stone towards the children enjoying the garden more,” he said.

Here, at JACK, we love this type of story – a garden teaches so much to people of all ages, especially children. So excited are we that we have donated a collection of JACK horticultural support products to the school, including mesh, netting, ties, plant props and stakes, trellises, cages and garden gloves that will help them plant, grow and protect their crops.

The children then had to mix their compost or worm mix into the garden soil and around the veges and herbs, while learning to use their gardening tools properly.

They loved it!! There were lots of dirty hands and lots of handling of wriggly worms!

We can’t wait to see the difference these skills make to their crops.

In the race to the end of the year, the school garden is a hive of activity. The weeding and pruning of all veges and herbs is a priority, as is the completion of the native tree labels. All the school’s trees will have labels that identify them via their botanic name as well as give information on the traditional indigenous uses of the tree’s bark, leaves and/or flowers. For example, the nectar from the grevillea flower was soaked in water, to make a sweet drink. This labelling initiative has proven popular with students AND teachers.

The students are also using a clinometer to measure the height of their Bunya Pine. It’s obviously quite a mature tree as current estimate is about 35m tall!

The four native stingless bee hives are proving to be a big hit. Students are enjoying learning about the bees’ lifestyle – the fact they are attracted to blue, white mauve and purple flowers and that there can be as many as 10,000 bees in a single hive! And while these bees produce very little honey, they are terrific little helpers in other ways. They are excellent pollinators – resulting in bigger harvests of fruit and vegetables. The students are currently engaged in an important experiment – the comparison of compost bins, some of which have food scraps and some don’t. We will report back on the results!

Quite recently the students planted some mini tomato tubestock, which quickly went crazy! The position is obviously ideal for these sweet treats – but sadly, the fruit will probably be perfect for picking while the students are on their summer break! The students were thrilled to see such prodigious growth though and have learnt valuable lessons re the planting and nurturing of seedlings.

Fruit trees have been tidied, weeded and mulched, with the Jack Tree Rings making the whole process a lot easier.

One surprise on the return to school was the sight of three huge bunches of bananas, containing as many as a dozen hands each. They are now hanging in a small shed to slowly ripen.