Our Kitchen Garden has been a hive of curiosity, creativity and wonder this year as our Year 2 students explored God’s creation with both their hands and their minds. One of the highlights has been watching students code their own digital games. As they wrestled with sequencing, problem-solving and design choices, we discussed how coding […]
This term, our Prep and Year 1 students have been busy learning in the Kitchen Garden, where curiosity, discovery, and fun go hand in hand. The garden provided a rich learning environment for students to connect science, technology, and sustainability in age-appropriate and joyful ways. In Prep, students were introduced to early coding through the
Our Kitchen Garden is bursting with life and activity! Each day at first break, primary students have the opportunity to roll up their sleeves and get involved in a range of hands-on gardening adventures. From raising seeds and planting seedlings to harvesting fresh produce and searching for bugs, there is always something exciting happening! One
Such a busy and fun term! This term began with some festive decorations, lovely for this time of year. You may have noticed our nature-based decorations hanging from our pergola. This all began by harvesting some of our delicious blueberries from our three, generous, thriving bushes. These bushes have been under a net for some
Spring has finally arrived and we are heating up again here in the garden. The children have been putting together some very whimsy floral bee ‘baths’ for the critters to enjoy. Bees cannot swim and prefer to perch themselves on a rock or nearby structure to access drinking water. Bees don’t need to take a
If you’re looking for a delicious mid-winter dish, look no further. Our students were busy frying up some broccoli and broccolini. What’s the difference you ask? and how long do they take to grow? Ask your P-2 children and let’s see what they say. (It takes around 100 days to grow just one head of
Winter Chai Many wonderful moments were had this term. The most vivid – a gigantic visitor who took a fondness for Mrs McClure’s hat. Didymuria violescens, the violet-winged stick insect (or phasma). Wow, what a beauty! Native to Australia, these huge insects are peaceful vegetarians, this species preferring to nosh on eucalyptus leaves. The children and
The cooler Autumn weather is finally here and we are loving our time together in the Kitchen Garden. Our harmonious space is springing to life again after the formidable heat of our South-East Queensland summer. The self-seeding delights of coriander, calendula, lettuce, corn, basil, and celery have volunteered themselves this season for which we are
As the summer heat appears to be in decline, we are preparing to sow our winter vegetables. Snow Peas are shooting already; the seed sown from last year’s prosperous harvests. Cabbages and cauliflower seedlings will be planted, and we will begin to discover which pests will need to be kept at bay from the brassica
Here comes the sun. Welcome back to the Kitchen Garden, 2023! This has been our hottest term in the garden, with summer surely stifling even some of our greatest heat-loving plants. We have been trying our hand at hollowing out some huge cucumber specimens using a spoon. They resemble a small cup, which can then
Welcome to our last Kitchen-Garden newsletter for 2022! Bug hotel In order to provide shelter and safety for beneficial bugs to ‘set up home’, breed, pollinate, rest, and eat other pests, the children are constructing a bug hotel. In small teams, they are foraging for natural and recycled materials to design and arrange within the
Welcome to our last term of 2022! Our lovely new Hydroponic tables are pumping out some green goodies. The lettuce and celery are looking super healthy and will be utilized in our Ham and Salad Rice Paper Roll recipe. The children have had fun soaking the rolls, filling them with various offerings from the garden,
The beds are warming up! This month marks the beginning of a lovely spring! Hooray! If you haven’t already, please have a look at our YouTube videos which display all the lovely tasks the children have been getting up to in Kitchen Garden. This month is our favourite, simply because the garden starts to wake
Our Kitchen Garden lessons are always designed with ‘purpose’ in mind. Your children are bringing so much enthusiasm, excitement, and a natural curiosity for what’s happening here in our Kitchen Garden. My hope is to inspire them to grow their own foods, by teaching them simple skills that are easy to understand and easy to
The cool weather is upon us. A few windy polar blasts haven’t kept us from enjoying our time together in the Kitchen Garden. My name is Nicole Young. I have been blessed with the opportunity to coordinate our Kitchen-Garden program for our Prep, YEar 1 and 2 students. Growing food is a passion for me,
The blessed rains have ceased, just in time for us to welcome our Preps, Year 1 and 2 students into the Kitchen Garden. Praise God! We are beginning winter here in Southern Queensland, which is merely a blink and it’s over for our ‘cool-season’ crops. We planted some broccoli and cauliflower seedlings amongst the pollinator-attracting
Kitchen Garden has had another fun fortnight. We harvested our potatoes and made yummy potato pizzas. The children loved the harvesting and the eating of the pizza. We have had so many beautiful plump blueberries that everyone has had fun picking and eating. Our gardens have had most things taken out now and new soil
Our Kitchen Garden has some new friends (our scarecrows) looking after our gardens and will stay till the end of summer. Each class has made their own class scarecrow, and they look fantastic and were a lot of fun to make. We saw a cheeky king parrot eating some of our cherry tomatoes right next
The students in our Kitchen Garden have been harvesting the most delicious strawberries and we made a very yummy strawberry and ricotta cake. We have also been harvesting blueberries and also added them on the top of the cake. Our vegetables have gone to seed and it’s always fun collecting the seeds and using them
In our Garden, we have been growing kale, and although we may not all like kale, it is really good for you and there are so many ways to use it and disguise it in our food (for those who don’t enjoy it). Our little chefs made kale and ricotta scrolls with our beautiful fresh
In our Garden, we have been growing kale, and although we may not all like kale, it is really good for you and there are so many ways to use it and disguise it in our food (for those who don’t enjoy it). Our little chef’s made kale and ricotta scrolls with our beautiful fresh
This term we are talking about healthy eating, and the children are cutting out healthy food choices and glueing them on a plate. This is helping them see and talk about what is best to keep their bodies feeling good, well and strong. We have had some beautiful produce growing in Kitchen Garden, so we
Well another term is over for Kitchen Garden and it has been full of fun and activities. We made Anzac biscuits, cooked for the Maleny Show and got a first and third, discovered interesting facts about bugs in the gardens and then hunted for them. (I think finding worms were the favourite things to find), and
Our beautiful Preps to Year 2 students did a marvellous job cooking for the Maleny Show. They cooked sweet potato and sage scones, pikelets, lavender biscuits, orange cake, and olive and rosemary damper. It was all delicious and looked great. The competition was high, but we came away with a first for our damper and
This term in the Kitchen Garden we have been discovering bugs in the garden. Some are good for our gardens and some are not. The students have had a lot of fun finding them and reading facts about them. We have a big crop of oranges on our trees so we made a delicious citrus
Here we are Week 1 of a new term and we are all about bugs in our gardens this term. What a way to start with our once beautiful Asian greens beings eating over the holidays by naughty caterpillars and grasshoppers. The children had so much fun searching for bugs and digging up worms and then learning
Wow, Week 10 of first term is here already. We have done so much and had a lot of fun. In Week 9 we had a lot of rain and we couldn’t get out into the garden, so we brought the Kitchen Garden to the classroom. Each student was given a clear plastic cup and
During Weeks 7 and 8 In Kitchen Garden, we made delicious corn fritters, using our corn, capsicum and mint (yes mint) from our garden. You would not normally include mint in a fritters recipe but it adds a fresh burst of flavour to the fritters. These are great for school lunch boxes or any time
What a great start back to Kitchen Garden for 2021. We came back from the holidays to some beautiful big eggplants, sunflowers, corn, tomatoes, pineapple and honeydew melon. Our students have been busy harvesting them all and our wonderful chefs cooked an eggplant dip in the first week of Kitchen Garden. Then in Week 3
Well it’s our last week in Kitchen Garden and to celebrate we made some ginger star cookies and all the children got to ice them. They had so much fun and so did we. We have had a wonderful year in the Kitchen Garden and we look forward to 2021 with you all. Have a
Kitchen Garden has been busy harvesting our potatoes and turning them into mini pizza bases. They are super easy to make. Cut potatoes into slices and par-cook the potatoes with skin on, then place the sliced cooked potatoes on a lined baking tray and top with homemade tomato sauce and grated cheese. Sprinkle with rosemary
We had a wonderful time in Kitchen Garden making these very easy and very yummy strawberry tarts, using the strawberries from our garden. The children loved them and it was fun to make something different. The simple recipe is below. In the garden, we have pulled out our potatoes and it is always so wonderful
Over the last two weeks in the Kitchen Garden we have been harvesting our carrots and zucchinis. They have both grown beautifully. Our celery has done well and is nice and crunchy. We have been making a delicious zucchini dip with carrots, celery and homemade crackers. Most of the children loved it! The gardens are
We have been harvesting our carrots and they are beautiful! We have an abundance of tomatoes and onions and our zucchinis are still growing, along with our squash and celery. The children have been enjoying making coleslaw chicken wraps using our beautiful cabbage and kale. These are great for easy dinners or school lunch boxes.
Wown it’s Week 10 and what a great term we have had in Kitchen Garden. This fortnight we have been making zucchini spaghetti with tomato sauce and rosemary flatbread. We made the sauce from our tomatoes grown this term and naturally the zucchini and rosemary also came from our garden. Most of the children loved
Wow, we are in week 6 already and our gardens are growing beautifully. Over the last two weeks we have been using our pumpkins we harvested at the start of this term to make pumpkin, spinach and feta rolls. They are so delicious and you will want to make them at home to pop in
In Weeks 7 and 8, our Kitchen Garden chefs have been busy making fried rice with all our beautiful green vegetables from our garden. We have continued to talk about hygiene in the garden and it’s been fun doing some craft to remind us of how to keep our gardens healthy. Come and have a look
In Weeks 3 and 4 in the Kitchen Garden, we have been harvesting our beautiful Asian greens to make a very yummy Asian noodle soup. This is a very easy quick meal for a cold winter night, and the kids love it. The recipe is below. We have planted potatoes, carrots, celery, squash, and freshened
Welcome back to Kitchen Garden. It has been so wonderful to see all our Prep, Year 1 and 2 classes back with their beautiful smiling faces. As a welcome back, we decided to use our beautiful oranges to make orange and poppyseed muffins. They were a great hit and I will put the recipes below for you to
Kitchen Garden is very quiet at the moment without our beautiful Preps to Year 2 students. Mrs McClure and I have been busy keeping our garden weeded, planting our seedlings that have grown over the holidays, pruning our trees and harvesting our beautiful cucumbers and sweet potatoes. We have corn, tomatoes, lettuce, capsicum and more cucumbers
Sweet potato gnocchi with tomato basil sauce is on the menu this week in Kitchen Garden as we continue to use our abundance of sweet potato and another herb to try. Most children have loved it and licked the tomato basil sauce off their plates. After all the rain and hot weather we have had,
In Weeks 6 and 7 we continue to learn about herbs. The children are enjoying finding different herbs in the garden, smelling and tasting them. We have been busy planting beans, pumpkin, cucumber and kale and there is always a lot of weeding to be done. In the kitchen, our little chefs have been making delicious sage
It is so wonderful to meet all our new students and to see all the children back from their holidays and ready to learn in our wonderful Kitchen Garden. We started the year making a watermelon and mint smoothie with our beautiful big watermelons that grew over the summer holidays. We have harvested our sweet
How lovely it was to see the sunshine this week in Kitchen Garden. This fortnight has seen us harvest a bumper crop of eggplants which lead to the next challenge…how do we get the children to eat them? Our answer was to make a delicious eggplant, capsicum and onion dip served with homemade herb pikelets,
We have had another fun filled fortnight in Kitchen Garden. Here are this fortnight’s recipes with photos at the bottom of this article. HOMEMADE CRACKERS Ingredients 2 cups of plain flour 1 cup of warm water 4 tbs olive oil ¼ teaspoon salt 2 tsp castor sugar 1 tablespoon dried herbs (we used dill) extra
What beautiful growing weather we have had! Our garden beds that were empty only a few short weeks ago are growing so quickly. We replenished the beds with lots of compost and lucerne mulch before planting zucchini, squash, corn, cucumber, tomatoes, beetroot, lettuce, rocket, spring onions, beans and lots of Asian greens. During this term
What do you do when you arrive back to an overgrown jungle in Kitchen Garden? You call in the Super Mum Army to help. Last Friday an enthusiastic group of ladies arrived with their gardening gloves and muscles ready to tackle the weeds and rediscover the hidden garden beds. After much chopping, pulling, heaving and
Back in Term 2 Mackenzie’s dad, Peter, joined us in KG to help out. He had the fun job of leading the way with the tomatoes, in the weeding, mulching and planting of sunflower seedlings in the garden bed next to the Prep Maroon shed. Months of watering and nurturing the seedlings saw them grow
We certainly appreciated the cooler day on Tuesday compared to last weeks scorcher in KG! The garden is looking great at the moment and is providing us with an abundant harvest of zucchinis, cherry tomatoes, Black Russian tomatoes, broad beans and red onions, which have all been used in the kitchen to prepare delicious dishes.
All our watering efforts in week 3 seemed a waste of time as the heavens opened during Miss Evan’s Year 2 classes KG lesson. Students were out planting seedlings and watering as a few drops of rain began to fall. Within seconds the kids and their brave parent helper were huddled under the tree as
