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Farrer school's a hotbed of green activity

Kitchen garden

Team effort ... Ashling Donnelly, 12,  Bradan Schofield, 12,  and Carol Edwards tend to crops at Farrer Primary School.
Team effort ... Ashling Donnelly, 12, Bradan Schofield, 12, and Carol Edwards tend to crops at Farrer Primary School.Melissa Adams

More and more schools are starting gardens and transforming canteens with fresh-cooked food, but for some the shift has been under way for years. Farrer Primary School's Environment Centre opened a decade ago, and all 300 children in the school, including the pre-school, are involved.

Five parent volunteers, at the moment all mothers, help every Monday, planting seeds and seedlings, weeding, mulching, watering, harvesting and packaging seeds for fetes. Fathers come in to prune and espalier fruit trees and donate woodchips.

A group of year 6 pupils volunteer in the centre during lunchtime three days a week, looking after the animals and vegetable crops. There are free-range chickens, worm farms, budgerigars, turtles, guinea pigs and stick insects, and poddy lambs are brought in during the last term for children to hand-feed.

Handy fruit ... Peaches  Farrer Primary School's environment centre.
Handy fruit ... Peaches Farrer Primary School's environment centre.Melissa Adams
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Eggs from the hens are used in cooking lessons, and leftovers are sold in the staffroom. Lunch scraps are collected in recycling bins and fed to the worms along with vegie scraps from the gardens. Worm wee is diluted and watered on the garden and worm casts are added to the garden beds.

Carol Edwards has children at the school and volunteers in the centre. She's also Farrer's ''scientist in school''. She is an agricultural and environmental scientist and an entomologist working part-time with the Department of Agriculture.

Edwards teaches the children, teachers and parents how to grow crops, watering techniques, the importance of crop rotation and controlling pests without chemicals. The two gardens at the school are planted for winter and summer crops. Seeds are collected and sold, and the great aunt of one of the kindy pupils has donated extra organic and heritage seeds to the school.

Before Christmas, the students harvested young broad beans that they cooked and ate in the pod, like edamame beans. When the beans are older they make dhal using garlic and eschalots grown in the garden, sometimes with added silverbeet. They prepare and eat sushi, okonomiyaki (Japanese savoury pancakes), gyoza (dumplings), onigiri (rice balls) and nikujaga (beef and potato stew), all part of their Japanese education.

Summer vegetable crops include sweet corn and popping corn, capsicum and chilli, varieties of tomatoes, snowpeas, sugarsnap and garden peas, purple beans, yellow and green dwarf beans, spinach, silverbeet, amaranth, pak choi, cauliflower, broccoli, kale, leeks, red and brown onions, zucchini, pumpkin, cucumber, rockmelon, beetroot and potatoes and various herbs. Amaranth appeared in a garden bed, and they cooked it with tomatoes, eschalots, thyme and pimento.

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Among the fruit trees, they have peaches, nectarines, plums and apricots and two varieties of pears. There are strawberries, raspberries and blackcurrants. The kindies are growing sunflowers. All these vegetables and fruits are planted for term one, when the crops will be ready for the children to harvest and cook.

During the holidays, parents volunteer to look after the animals and vegie crops.

>> Susan Parsons is a Canberra writer.

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