Food Gardens for Our School Children
WaterUps for Schools & ELCS
Keep your school garden alive over the holidays
The importance of food and herb gardens in schools
School gardens are important for teaching children where food comes from. Increasingly with food scarcity in many families, and 13.6% of Australians living below the poverty line, knowing how to grow food is an important life skill to master.
Compared to seventy years ago, more than two-thirds of Australians now live in a capital city with the urban sprawl of our cities taking up once was valuable land used for market gardens and quarter-acre home blocks.
For many children today, fruit and vegetables come from the supermarket – they don’t have any lived experience of growing food nor food production. Plus, they are losing the connection to land which can be a valuable anchor for people as they go through life.
This is why across ELC and school initiatives like Nature Play, Recycling and edible gardens are taking off.
Creating and maintaining gardens helps students to develop knowledge and skills for sustainable living, and for studying how we can meet human needs while preserving the environment for future generations. Practical activities in garden design, planting and harvesting, can be linked to a range of curriculum areas including science, arts, literacy, and numeracy.
Involving students in food gardens is a rewarding and educational experience with academic, social and environmental benefits.
WaterUps® provides the ideal solution for schools looking to implement vegetable gardens and sensory herb gardens.
- We offer three solutions suitable for schools:
- Our WaterUps Wicking cells and Sub-Irrigation Channels (SICs) for custom, large gardens, ideal for large ag plots.
- Our Oasis 1680 Wicking Garden Bed which comes with the wicking cells included
- Our Food Garden Kits that have everything a school needs to have a thriving food garden (Colorbond ® raised garden bed frame, Waterups Wicking set up, garden bed frame and covers to keep insects out, worm farm and composting products.)
Why use WaterUps?
- Our WaterUps wicking beds use 80% of the water of above ground irrigation system, meaning less water and time is needed to water and maintain a garden.
- Keep your school garden alive and watered during holidays when you’re not there, thanks to our unique wicking watering system which will ensure plants will mostly survive
- The WaterUps team can provide guidance in fund raising for your school or ELC garden and can help with identifying and accessing appropriate grant funding.
In some locations, WaterUps has links with organisations that can provide ongoing advice and assistance in maintaining your school garden, e.g., in NSW, this is Sydney Pocket City Farms and Wollongong Green Connect.
A guide to setting up your School Vegetable Garden with WaterUps
To see how Trinity Grammar School in Sydney incorporated their Green Patches into the curriculum, watch the video below put together by their Sustainability Teacher, Mel Bargwanna.
Trinity Grammar School Summer Hill NSW
In mid 2021 WaterUps worked with Landscape Architecture lecturer at UNSW, Melinda Bargwanna, to help establish an amazing array of wicking garden beds for growing edibles in a various areas of the junior school. These will be central to the sustainability ciriculum that Meinda will be running at Trinity.
Kiddiwinks Pre School, South Windsor NSW
In December 2020 WaterUps did its first installation for Urban Landscape Projects at their Kiddiwinks Pre School project at South Windsor in western Sydney. ULP has been building wicking beds into their landscape designs for a number of years. They are now using WaterUps because they make installation much easier.
Bondi Public School, Bondi NSW
In early 2019 WaterUps was approached by Bondi Public, a Stephanie Alexander kitchen garden school, to help solve a watering problem with their garden beds. This led to the school installing 35 WaterUps Oasis steel beds over the following year. In November 2022 the schools added additional Oasis beds and 3 new in-ground wicking beds with Sub-Irrigation Channels and Tree Planters.
St Lukes Grammar School, Freshwater
In October 2020 WaterUps helped St Luke’s refit a large existing garden bed on the roof area of the school with WaterUps and to build a new timber wicking bed.