Maintenance is an essential aspect of the garden design and should not be left as an afterthought. Understanding the needs of the users, their time and energy, in conjunction with working with nature to achieve the most productive garden with the least waste and work, will ensure your school garden will be successful in the long term. Gardens can fail because they become overgrown and look unloved, which makes them appear difficult, daunting and time consuming to manage.

As discussed in previous chapters, the design for maintenance should include both the physical garden space and the invisible systems and networks that support it. The more groups that use the garden, the more chance it has to be well looked after, remaining attractive and appealing to teachers and learners. If the energy for maintenance is coming solely from within the school itself, then the position of the garden is most important. In this case, the garden must be close to existing learning activity areas. Placing a garden out of sight or a long way from classrooms will ensure it is rarely used, used only by the faithful or will require an extra playground duty to increase its use. (This is enough to turn any teacher sour on the garden idea).

So start small and close to rooms where the garden can be monitored by children and staff and used in or out of class time. If that is not practical then consider building an outdoor shelter close to the garden. The style of gardenbed construction will greatly influence the ease or difficulty of maintenance. Raised garden beds are easier to maintain than those on the ground that can easily be overrun by grass.

Consider using untreated sleepers, water tank rounds or interlocking blocks. Raised beds provide better drainage. Paved or cement pathways are also easier to maintain than gravel or grass; but surfacing decisions do depend on many parameters such as funding, water availability, heat and reflection issues, the commitment to long term garden strategies and so on. School Gardens will be as diverse as the schools that build them, but they all will need to be maintained. So here are some generic suggestions for garden use and maintenance that will apply in some part to most school garden situations.

From Darwin to the Derwent, children are farming their school grounds and teachers are harvesting their work for teaching and learning opportunities.

It is no surprise that gardens are springing up in schools all over the country. The revival of school gardens has been driven by the efforts of a diverse group of stakeholders both within and outside of the school system. The input from these groups has meant that school gardens have re-emerged with a new vigour, pedagogy, gardening technique and urgency.

It is not a local phenomenon. Children all over the world, in countries rich and poor, are gardening at school. It is a global trend driven by global urgencies, at times hunger but more often environmental and health issues. Add climate change and energy descent (due to the likely impact of the peaking in production of the global oil supply) to this list and it may be that school gardens will receive even greater attention in the coming years.

The trend to revive the school garden is set to continue as there is a growing acceptance that a garden is a proper feature of a school ground and an integral part of a well-balanced curriculum. Education initiatives such as New Basics, Essential Learnings and Sustainable Schools will utilise the school garden as a scaffold upon which their initiatives can be developed in some way.

Children love gardens and their enthusiasm bodes well for the revival. The garden is one place in the schoolyard that they can call their own. The childish plot* looks set to be a common feature of school grounds for some time.

*Acknowledging Spensley Primary School garden in Clifton Hill, Melbourne.

The time has come to build new visions for school grounds. If we value authentic experiences for children, we would not lock up the schoolyard and drive the children inside. We would design their school environment to connect them to the richness of their world, to nature and the landscapes that we know reflect their interests and make meaning for them.

The school ground is a prime resource for all schools and traditionally its development has been for sport and gymnastic play. Schools on the whole make good provision for these needs of the child but the school ground has always been more than ovals and climbing frames.

Teachers have always known the value of a walk in the outdoors to collect or observe something in nature and have made good use of the schoolyard for their own purposes. And children have always used the playground for their lunchtime adventures among the natural features of the landscape. It is their outdoor classroom because learning also happens in the schoolyard. Children are learning all the time.

We take the wisdom of age-old practices to create visions of grounds that fulfil the needs of teachers, to find in the school landscape a natural diversity to enhance the development of the child’s environmental awareness through actual contact with the elements of that landscape.

These same landscapes can serve the needs of the child to play in natural areas among the plants and in the soil, to play creatively and safely, developing through their own resources, their own environmental awareness.

The schoolyard is an important place for the young and it can hold more than we traditionally assign to it. Children love to play sport and climb on the playground equipment but the modern child may need more. It may fall upon schools to add an environmental quality to the playground in light of the deficient opportunities that the urban child has for such connection. For the health of the modern child and, it could be argued, the modern ecology, it may become the duty of educators to provide, on campus, the means for children to have quality outdoor experiences on a daily basis and the wisdom to use them as teaching and learning opportunities.

The issues of environmental awareness and quality are not unconsidered in the modern school. The naturalisation of the school ground and its use as a teaching site has begun through projects such as school gardens, learnscaping and revegetation programs. These have been important pioneer activities in building a vision that school grounds can be developed for educational purposes, that grounds are a rich resource to support learning in curriculum subjects and that curriculum development and grounds development can be in partnership.

The call is for a new vision for school grounds - a new perception of how the grounds will look, what they will contain and how they will fit into the learning agenda.

Before going forward, it would be appropriate at this point to look at the history of the school garden and the forces that influenced its rise and fall over time. The following account is a brief explanation and I apologise to any whose contribution I have overlooked.

Grade: Upper Primary

Duration: 8 weeks
Outdoor areas utilised: Section of vegetable garden, cob oven, green house, pots outside classroom

Overview

• Listing the vegetables used in a pizza.
• Listing all ingredients and how they may be accessed. Costing a pizza that is bought, one that is ready made, one that is home made and one that has some home-grown ingredients.
• Finding the origin of these vegetables and identifying the climatic zone/s they come from.
• Describing the best growing conditions for the vegetables.
• Preparing a garden bed. Planting the vegetables appropriately. Caring for the plants during growth.
• Harvesting the vegetables.
• Preparing a pizza.
• Using a cob/ pizza oven.
• Celebration of Italian culture and its contribution to our Australian way of life.

Presented here are lists that attempt to cover the foundation knowledge for work in the school garden and which then expand to address the full range of sustainability issues. The lists are by no means complete or refined and are offered here as a guideline for teachers when planning. Teaches can pick and choose, adapt or write their own to use as a valuable tool in future planning processes.

The name of ‘Elementals’ was selected as they are truly the most elementary of all skills and knowledge needed for basic self reliance and the understanding of natural systems and their drivers. Once known, these elementals can form the thinking in subject areas that are far from the garden but still based on systems thinking that is so easily learned when playing, learning and growing outdoors.

So the elementals form a collection of elementary understandings in science which are learned in the school garden and then form the building blocks for thinking, learning and acting in the real world.