The Garden of Ideas

In May 2022, I started with a blank canvas at our local high school.

The concept that the school director had was to have an integrated learning experience for the first year students who are around 12 years old. He wanted them to do some learning outside, in English and to learn more about gardening, nature and integrated skills.

I am a recent gardener, having become interested during the pandemic. So, I started reading and learning. Everyone said the most important thing was planning but as I was new, I had no idea what this meant. I grew tomatoes from seed and put them rather randomly. Over time, as I read and learnt more, I became hooked. The garden is now in it's second year with the students and it's a great success. The garden is called 'The garden of ideas' because we experiment a lot. We use a variety of gardening techniques including no dig, square foot gardening and we have a couple of lasagna beds. Local cafe's donate coffee, I get pallets from around the area to make the beds and use recycled materials wherever I can.

As we are in a drought, we have a variety of water systems including ollas, water bottles with wicking systems and holes.

Now, we have 9 homemade beds and we cover these topics during the 3 month rotation with the students. Each group of 3-4 students has a bed of their own, colour coded. They look after the bed for 3 months then make a poster to hand the bed over to the next group. We experiment with different plants growing together and this last group just planned their bed and what they want to plant according to various factors.

We cover:

• companion planting and planting in general
• life cycle of a plant
• support structures - students look at different types, make a prototype then create their own support structure and look at the pros and cons
• water systems - ways of watering, saving water, deep watering and they make their own water systems
• lasagna beds, square metre beds, no dig
• mulch - we collect leaves in autumn to make leaf mulch
• feeding the soil - we grow borage and I collect nettles to make teas for the plants
• testing the soil - red cabbage juice as a Ph tester and we use it to check acidity or alkalinity
• growing seeds and keeping last year's seeds

A few months ago some trees at the school were cut down so we got the chaps to cut the trunks into smaller pieces and now we have an outdoor classroom which is so calming for the students.

It's exciting to be part of a movement :-)

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