NOW in its fourth year, The Living School Kitchen Garden, is shifting to another phase as the Onland Learning site goes through the council approval process.

Term One of 2026 has seen our students, once again, focus on the theme of IDENTITY.

In July 2022, under the guidance of Aidan, our parents, teachers and children turned the first Living School Kitchen Garden sod. Now in 2026, it is a lush oasis of fruit trees and beds that continues to provide our Jabay canteen with fresh organic produce each week.

We have so many wonderful photos on file, celebrating our LSKG identities over the years and the learning they undertook with Tiff, we’ve decided to publish this gallery.

Next term, the theme is NATURE, and we look forward to unveiling some new developments taking place at The Conway Street campus, as the LSKG goes URBAN.

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What the LSKG kids have grown

What the LSKG kids have created

What they’ve pickled

What they’ve made and whittled!

AS another year ends with SERVICE to the community, a new one begins with a focus on IDENTITY for the students returning to Living school in term one of 2026.

Now in its third year, here is a snapshot of the wonderful produce, projects and designs created by our Year 5-8 students during the course of their last term in the calendar.

The Living School Middle Market is a celebration of all they have experienced during the course of their Project-based Learning programs. It takes place in the Brown & Jolly building in the centre of Lismore, bringing to life the centre of the City, still rebounding from the 2022 flood.

The market raises funds for local charities, chosen by the students. The aim is to give back our community beyond the school grounds.

It is always a joy to see proud teachers and parents stand back as the students display their creations, embued with confidence gained during the year.

For the kids who have spent their Fridays in the LSKG over the past year, it is a chance to feed those gathered with the recipes, condiments, cordials and utensils they have been rustling up around and on the open fire.

What the LSKG kids have grown

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What the LSKG kids have created

What they’ve pickled

What they made and whittled!

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Tiff from The LSKG

The Garden offered itself in flowers this term. What a welcoming for our middle-school LSKG cooking group. Our introduction was through blooms and scents hidden like gems to be found: white displays of sweet lemon, lime and macadamia flowers, dainty avocado blossoms, mini spicy yellow mizuna flowers, bright blue borage blooms. If you look closely you can see some of the baby fruits just popping through.

Flowers teach us about the world. They speak the language of beauty and relationship. Their stunning displays pay service to the interconnection of all things. From tiny insects to large animals, all play a part in the flower dance - and we are just one of the creatures beholden to their phenomenal power.

How many beings are reliant on this interdependence of this plant and animal tango?

Anna in Living School’s Jabay Kitchen

In Chinese Medicine, windy weather allows the illness into the body from the back of the neck. Here on the Northern Rivers, the winds are typically around in September and October before the spring is really here to stay. With so much gorgeous lemon myrtle, lemongrass and mint coming out of the LSKG we thought it a perfect opportunity to create a healing tincture. Both the lemon myrtle & lemongrass have antibacterial, antifungal & anti-inflammatory properties and are high in antioxidants. We also add local honey for extra benefits and to sweeten the brew!

Below is photographic snapshot of the energy and joy amongst our community of volunteers as they share in the creation of our food for the students and staff each week.

AIDAN - Growing in The Garden

There is a rat living in the garden. It enjoys a diverse diet, beginning the feast with an antipasti of seasonal leaves and cherry tomatoes before moving on to a main course of broccoli and sweet potato. The rat has an intuitive sense of where the sweet potatoes are located and often it will find them before me. Maybe it helps having your nose so close to the ground.

Cauliflowers with a shorter stem are eaten while the longer purple-stemmed cauliflower isn’t touched. I may have to grow taller ones to escape the rat’s reach.

It has been two years since we turned a paddock into a food-producing garden. It is remarkable how much the stonefruit trees have grown. When you start by planting baby trees and wait years, the first sign of flowers, heralding fruit, feels like a blessing. We have since enjoyed passionfruit, strawberries and peaches. Now the trunks are too wide to get both hands around. I’ve accepted losses to the rat - up until now - because they were such a small percentage of what’s being grown. But about 50% of the broccoli leaves and flowers have been taken. Half his luck!

But it isn’t just the rat keeping our produce at bay. Extreme winds and heat, and occasional chomps from opportunistic cows have kept some of the other fruit trees small. This has made them more susceptible to disease and other pests.

I've tried to be patient and most of the trees have now come of age and it’s marvellous to behold (and smell). I am reading about the presence of birds of prey deterring rodents and considering if I can coax them to this garden at the top of the hill.

When there is a balanced mix of plants growing together, it can make for a more resilient garden. If you are growing fields of only broccoli, the bugs that enjoy eating broccoli will cheer, gorge and multiply. If the broccoli is surrounded by something smelly like nasturtium or garlic, pests can be deterred. Growing small patches of broccoli can also help, so that if one patch is attacked, the others are less likely to be affected.

The kids have picked up a lot over this past term. They know where there is food there are creatures who, like us, seek to benefit. The challenge is always balance.

Everything adapts! Including us.

Tiff - Cooking in The Garden

Winter at Living School coincides with the theme of Civilisation, so I decided to bring an old globe of the world into The Garden. What better way to illustrate how our growing microcosm in the LSKG is a blueprint for the Earth’s wisdom and how all things are connected.

With every year group we begin the lesson with an acknowledgment of all the plants and creatures in this outdoor classroom (including ourselves):

From the start, we are on equal plane with all the living beings here. We followed with our ‘give’ (feeding the plants and soil) before we ‘take’ (harvest and cook) approach inspired by ancient cultures.

The Year Fours collected leaves to observe the great diversity of shapes and patterns among the plants. Any feature zoned in on in the Garden can reveal worlds upon worlds, even leaves! We start thinking about the different plants and how some are very old like moss, ferns and bromeliads, which were alive since dinosaur time (pineapples being part of this family).

Pineapples can take years to produce fruit compared to the younger plants (Angiosperms) like apples, oranges strawberries that, thanks to insects and other pollinators, have evolved flowers bearing fruits in a couple weeks or months.

We admired sweet purple snow pea flowers while nibbling on spicy purple mizuna. Yellow calendula, pink peach blossoms, orange nasturtium, blue cornflower and borage flowers, and the great rainbow silverbeet have all brought The Garden alive.

We cycled manure and tucked the beds in with mulch and learned that nutrients like potassium from banana peels “help to break down the soil and make citrus trees happy”.

We then planted baby broccoli to create new bouquets of flavour and revisited the potatoes we planted last term, which were now poking out their new green tops.

We didn’t get a change to cook up broccoli this year but last winter, The Year Ones had their first garden cook up!

After going on a treasure hunt for the 5 humble heads of broccoli and herbs (for the sauce), we got straight into building the fire and making the batter for the broccoli nibbles. It is a lovely practice to harvest food, then cook on a fire, connecting us back to our 10, 000 yr old ancestral roots. These two discoveries (farming and fire) gave rise to the rest of civilisation as we know it. It is lovely to return to these two practices week after week since these are two of the most fundamental practices that make us human.

Broccoli battered nibbles lightly cooked over a fire, with a garden yogurt dipping sauce, served on a nasturtium plate -“best thing I’ve ever eaten” (Edie) - says it all!

Next came the lesson in sauerkraut, the origins of which began in the Orient. This food combination can be traced back to the labourers on The Great Wall of China, who had to live off fermented cabbage and rice for months on end.

We searched out our plump cabbages in the garden, as well as some juicy beetroots. We then pounded the vibrant greens and reds together in bowls. The students salted and massaged the kraut-to-be and squished the bounty into jars previously plunked in boiled water on the fire. A cabbage leaf ‘sealed’ the jar to let it breathe while the lactic acid bacteria would start to colonise and ferment the cabbage.

In The Living School Kitchen (Jabay) with Anna

Did you know that eating fermented foods like sauerkraut with your meal helps you digest and absorb the nutrients from your proteins? So with all the cabbages, beets and daikon coming from The Garden, Hot Dogs became the logical choice for the menu this term.

So has food that boosts the immune system. As the winter blows in we say goodbye to the last of the passionfuit. They’ve been the stars of the show for a while now but with so much illness in the school community their antioxidant properties could not be more welcome.

Passionfruit is a great source of Vitamin A & C, polyphenols & carotenoids. It is high in fiber and has a low glycemic index - great for keeping blood sugar levels low.

Not only have we used them to make a delicious coulis in the fruit cups they’ve made for great passionfruit & coconut milk gummies, passionfruit jam, muffins and bliss balls.

Speaking of the immune system, we’ve also been brewing up big from The Garden produce in Jabay this term.

Our house-made organic chicken bone broth has been reduced from veggie scraps, turmeric, ginger, garlic, lemon myrtle and other herbs cooked down with apple cider vinegar & sea salt.

We even made an immune-boosting tincture made up of ginger, turmeric & black pepper mixed with local honey. The syrup is then diluted with warm water and the juice of a bush lemon to make a cold & flu fighting tonic and the base for an immune-boosting turmeric latte at the coffee cart.

It feels good to be able to feed the community at Living School with recipes and ingredients that have stood the test of time.

Sometimes it’s worth looking back at Civilisation to go forwards.

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YEAR 4 formed an instant attraction to the mini-beasts they found in the soil. There was ‘Jerry, The Big Fat Rainbow Worm’ and ‘George Junior, the baby one’, as well as ‘Bob, who looked as if he might die’.

Why, as humans, do kids feel the need to personify The Garden’s creatures?

“Because by naming them, comes the desire to learn what they are”, says Tiff our LSKG mentor.

“There is an innate need for connection between children and all ‘tiny life friends’ in our garden.”

The whole purpose of The Living School Kitchen Garden is to enhance the child’s connection with nature, to deepen this relationship, and hence set up a life-long connection with and love for the environment. This is called Biophilia.

The hope is a love of nature, from a young age, will help foster a desire to create solutions to protect the planet.

“It’s a joy to teach,” says Tiff.

“A sense of wonder with the environment is still so alive and fresh in children because the inherent love of the natural world hasn’t been socialised out of them.”

This connection comes from, not only witnessing but, touching, tasting, and smelling nature’s beauty - an experience no electronic device can ever hope to emulate or conjur.

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Tiff on Teaching in The Garden - Creative Relational Learning

To lead our inquiry and shape our learning, I was inspired to make a ‘garden box’ as a relational educational tool where students could ask questions, make reflections and give a message to The Living Garden, says Tiff.

The most beautiful questions bloomed out of the bright-eyed, soft-hearted Kindy and Year Ones this third Living School term which was focused on the theme of Life & Living. Each went into the box.

“What happens underground while plants are growing?” - Arlo

“How do plants make food?” - Ritchie

Why do bees like honey? - Freya

Why do flowers have nice scent? - Maddie

Why are praying mantis green? - Neo

Why are leaves green? - Jude

Why do leaves smell? - Sunni

How does garden grow watermelons? - Olive

Why are flowers so beautiful? - Lara

Why do bees like honey?  - Lennox

We went about the beds to answer the questions. Soon the garden was revealing her secrets. We caught sunlight in a jar, and tried to catch grasshoppers - although the latter proved to be much harder to catch! says Tiff.

It soon became obvious there was an interdependence going on - the soil, air, sun, living things were all interacting parts. Everything existed together - everything was a part of the whole.

Eyes lit up as the reciprocal nature of the relationships became clear and the students began drawing these connections. Arrows and lines created webs - sun>plant, worm>soil, bee>flower. For the older years, these become flow chart lessons in photosynthesis and pollination.

As one Year 4 student observed:

“The chicken eats a butterfly, the chicken urinates on the ground, this gets evaporated into clouds, the clouds turn into rain and the rain waters a flower, the flower’s pollen helps a beehive grow, we eat honey, then we feed the chicken, and the chicken pees and that’s how the circle goes”

We then planted some delicate broccoli and lettuce seedlings, and practiced the “Give Before We Take” principle in the LSKG.

If you pluck a range of 'weeds' and let them sit in water for many weeks, a lovely green-brown murky weed tea steeps into a delicious fertilizer. The dark liquid concoction is then ladelled into watering cans creating an activity that brings so much delight.

The small gentle tending in watering the young shoots with weed tea and worm juice made for the biggest smiles. It becomes apparent ‘The Give’ nourishes the person practicing almost more than it does ‘The Garden’.

The Year Ones, Twos and Threes quietly then found a spot in the garden, to sit and let themselves be drawn in. Through sketching in The Garden, they embarked on some magical creative exploration. In the afternoon, Middle School students came to join them.

Strawberries, apples, and passion fruit blossoms inspired some. Simple leaves were enough for others. The students related to ‘the feel’ of ‘The Garden’ in abundance. It was just them and the leaf, the flower, the fruit. Truly beautiful.

Cooking in The Garden

This time last year it was the beautiful Trombonchio Squash we were able to harvest for our garden cook-up. We worked in two groups to “Collect, Chop, Cook, Chomp and Clean-up” as we made our ‘Tromboncino Pizzas’. One group worked together to cut the tricky trombone shaped squash- which was then used like a zucchini when young, or like a pumpkin when matured.

“Tastes like a cucumber with no flavour, but flavour” - said one young gardener.

The classes then seared the Tromboncino rounds in oil and parmesan to make the mini pizza bases, while the other group prepared the sauce with herbs and tomatoes from the garden. The mini pizzas were carefully assembled, with bases and sauce, then a sprinkle of cheese melted on top and Voila! Mini Tromboncino squash pizzas! Some students said it was the best pizza they ever had!

This year was much the same with our pumpkins.

Then in Jabay (our school canteen), Anna peeled, sliced, oiled and seasoned the Trombonchinos and roasted them in the oven. One of our families donated a large bag of pomegranates grown on their property so guess what we did next? We served them up together drizzling the combination with a dressing of tahini, garlic, lemon juice along with the secret ingredient of nutritional yeast flakes (made up of beta-glucans, a special fibre) and some fresh mint.

In her posts to the school community, Anna points to other good sources of super fibre that goes into our canteen food: oats, mushrooms, beans, peas, lentils, broccoli, eggplant, sweet potato, apples, strawberries, prunes & seaweeds.

“Keeping blood sugar levels stable keeps us feeling full longer and without those sugar cravings between meals. It also provides for a deeper sleep and better concentration throughout the day,” says Anna.

Aidan creates garden connection by mimicking a forest ecosystem

The connection of all things in ‘The garden’ can also be found deep below the soil, says Aidan.

He is guided by concepts of Syntropic farming, where a forest ecosystem is mimicked creating a dense planting that occupies different strata.

“As well as shade, another benefit of a system like this is the production of compost in situ. Plants are regularly pruned and the pruned bits are dropped right there to the earth. This slowly decomposes and feeds the soil,” says Aidan.

Strangely, it is through roots that forests and grasslands produce new soil. The plant takes in sunlight and converts it to sugar – something humans can’t do. This sugar is then passed into the soil through its roots. Fungi is attracted to this sugar. The fungi then eats and excretes humus – a pure soil - mining minerals (something plants can’t do), which in turn passes it back to the plant.

The northern half of the garden is dedicated to growing fruit trees but Aidan has also discovered the turbo-growth of the pigeon pea to enhance the food forest.

Pigeon pea - has very quick growth, lovely soft hanging leaves and is good for chopping back and adding to the soil.

Comfrey –a long taproot to extract nutrients from the depths and draw them into its thick green leaves.

Mulberry – rapid growth and many delicious berries. These ‘pioneer’ species grow quickly and provide shelter for the young fruit and nut trees.

The rain was falling on the morning of our second LSKG session as summer was becoming autumn and the immediate thought (as an adult, at least) was perhaps we should cancel.

What a learning experience lost that would have been.

The students’ voices rose with excitement as they entered ‘The Garden” with the realisation they had #permissiontogetdirty.

One of Living School’s keystone themes of the term calendar is Identity. What better way to teach what it is to be human than to provide a connection with the earth and its ecosystems.

If we can give children a chance to experience this relationship, they have a much greater understanding of their sense of self. The respected Aboriginal elder, Bob Randall, describes this as ‘Kanyini’ or ‘oursness’.

This immersion starts simply with our kindergarten students and becomes progressively more sophisticated as the school years progress and students enquire to gain a broader understanding of ‘who am I, how do I relate to others and what’s around me’. Eventually, this leads to ‘how do I find my purpose’.

In the LSKG, the year has definitely started with the type of energy that comes from such purpose.

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Jabay (which means ‘a feed’ in Bundjalung) at the school’s Lismore campus takes place three times a week under Anna with Mylee, Kelly and the team. The wholefoods canteen has now been going strong for a couple of years and there is a clear idea of what we are trying to achieve.

Parents gather for their morning coffee to swap notes and what Living School brings to our children and their families.

The pull of a healthy delicious latte, chai or matcha - not to mention Anna’s lush organic gluten-free and dairy-free Persian Love Cake (as well as all the other naturally sweet treats) - brings an element of pride to everything we do. We’re also pleased to be able to provide the cheapest coffee in town!

Anna’s Jabay fun food facts

As summer officially comes to an end on The Northern Rivers, and we shift towards the cooler months of autumn the ‘rainy season’, it’s the perfect time to start to ease up on the sugar intake.

In traditional Chinese medicine, autumn is the time of the lungs and small intestine; a time of contraction and moving inwards, and a time of letting go of all that no longer serves us.

We also begin to reduce raw foods, which we eat abundantly over the summer months. It’s the time to nourish our bodies and protect them, both inside and out.

In Jabay, we can gradually introduce slower cooked foods and, in doing so, we fortify the immune system so we are strong and not susceptible to bugs during the winter months.

We have re-introduced our popular chilli con carne and bean chilli (our version of nachos!). A slow-cooked mix of seasonal veggies & organic beans seasoned with deep-flavoured spices and our farm-grown garlic. Think paprika, cumin & coriander (but there are no spicy chillies in these dishes!)

And for the meaty version, we use the incredible paleo mince from Locavore organic butchers in Byron Bay. It is nutrient-dense and loaded with minced liver & heart along with grass-fed and finished beef.

The bean chilli gets its protein hit from chickpeas as well as every kind of bean - red, pinto, lima, pigeon and black – all organic, much of which is coming out of ‘The Garden’. Both are served with organic corn chips and guacamole.

Finally, this week, we sent our compost, that had been beautifully breaking down over the summer, to the farm where it will feed and nourish the next batch of crops Aidan and our kids will be growing for us. It is so exciting to see the full loop of our eco-system at work with the farm and Jabay kitchen.

TIFF on ‘WHO’ is growing in the garden at the moment

Once the rain died down, the students were welcomed into the outdoor living classroom and the lesson began with ‘Who is growing at the moment’? ‘Why do we say ‘who’ instead of ‘what’? Plants are alive after all!

Can you find Parsley, Basil, Rosemary, Beetroot, Squash, Apple, Peach, Sweet Potatoes, Tomatoes and Celery? Who else catches your eye?

Students are full of beans and are ready to scamper through the garden finding all the clues to the seasonal plants growing.

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For the younger grades, a clue is often hidden to help identify a plant (like an apple in the apple tree, or sweet potato in the sweet potato vines), but most plants give so much away through their scent, leaf shape, or other small clues if we pay attention: a spikey macadamia leaf shape, or three delicate leaflets of a strawberry adorned with white blossoms, the smell of a crunched-up leaf of a lemon, a small pumpkin budding beneath a closed up flower.

A refreshing snack straight off the vine always finishes our garden treasure hunt. This year the students were welcomed by the tastes of plump figs, a giant cucumber, cherry tomatoes, and some fresh asparagus spears.

After we meet the plants and have a fresh nibble, we often follow with investigating the tiny hidden kingdom of soil life. From one second to the next, the garden becomes alive with colorful critters coming out of the woodwork! Lady beetles, beetles of all different shades, grasshoppers, butterflies, praying mantises both large and small, seem to all come out to greet us.

Students take turns holding a Millipede, Slater, or Earthworm, depending on who we meet. Their once tiny (now soil-covered) hands don’t look so tiny anymore, as we become the giants of the garden. I have found over my years teaching, the biggest smiles always come with holding a worm.

The life that abounds in the soil is celebrated as the students dig looking for more friends to collect on hands, leaves or in little habitat boxes.

We usually finish our day with our garden ‘Give before we Take’ practice, giving to the garden before we ‘take’ as the students prepare with excitement for a garden cook-up next week.

Students enjoy scooping manure with shovels and wheelbarrows, planting or watering seedlings, layering mulch, building a bed, or feeding the garden creatures with food scraps for the compost.

The Year Threes are remarkable with their attentive detail for planting seedlings, and Year Ones have a knack for gathering scraps to feed the worms, honouring the garden with every piece they collect for their newly met slimy friends.

We finished our day and left ‘The Garden’ feeling a little bit more alive than when we came.

AIDAN’s preparation

My morning ritual is a collection of cow poo. By 7:30am, the sun is already gathering heat. Mozzies arrive in gangs and have no difficulty poking their proboscis straight through my shirt. The school bus drivers chat and start their engines. I bumble the wheelbarrow down to the shady area where the cows rest. I continue to collect the poo to build garden beds. It won’t be long before I’ve got a team of young helpers to help me.

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Who is growing at the moment is a question all in the Living School Kitchen Garden ask each week.

Is it the parsley, is it the birds, is it the fruit trees, is it the planet? Is it us?

Hopefully, it is all of those things.

It is the key to the learning our kids experience because it creates the focus on the garden and all that comes out of it, and into us. Especially, as much of what we study, collect, chop and cook in the garden also ends up in our Living School Canteen or, as we call it, Jabay, which is the Bundjalung word for food or ‘a feed’.

The Living School Kitchen Garden (LSKG) was created as part of the school’s Onland Learning Program to offer the children total immersion in a living organic food ecosystem. It was created from scratch by Aidan with the help of the students and their parents and has been growing on the top of a hill in a paddock surrounded by cows for over two years now.

Last year, we created a seasonal diary to record what we all learned and, in 2025, we are repeating the cycle and publishing our experiences. This child-centric expose encapsulates the learning community’s intentions. Each week, the garden and Jabay team delight in the student’s reactions to what they have grown, plucked and produced on the open fire and in our kitchen.

You will be amazed at how much learning goes on from the bugs to the soil, to the seasons and weather, the colour, textures, smells - the overall interconnectedness of everything in our natural world.

Living School has a unique calendar that spreads over six terms covering the themes of Identity, Nature, Life and Living, Civilisation, Phenomena and Service. We have carried those themes into the teaching that comes out of the garden as we work with different year groups to study these themes to different levels of complexity.

Term One, Week One and Two were an exciting time in the garden as the year got started and the garden revealed its treasure.

But before we get going, meet the team who bring the garden-inspired creations to the children and now you!

TIFF’S INTENTION IN TEACHING ABOUT THE GARDEN

LSKG is all about teaching the ways and wonders of ‘The Garden” and how it teaches us “to give” and “to take” and to discover the community of living things working together to make ‘The Garden”.

We pay attention to the life in every layer: the soil, plants, animals, pollinators etc. We grow our connection to the abundant world and experience how everything is in relationship. We live the learning and teachings from ‘The Garden’.

And, it didn’t take long to get the garden party started this year.

In our culture, we are obsessed with what we can “take” and don’t pay respect to the reciprocal nature of our relationship with the earth. The class collected manure for the beds, planted seedlings, weeded the beds and then water water watered them.

Then came ‘the take’ as we celebrated our bounty by cooking it directly on an open fire.

We have cooked an array of garden recipes over the seasons since we began - from flatbreads flavored with herbs and spinach from The Garden, to young broad-bean leaf pesto, to scrumptious purple cauliflower nibbles.

When we can, we cook on an open fire because this is where the magic happens. We slow down and enjoy, grounding in our ancestral roots, cooking together from what we’ve grown, and eating together around the fire. It is healing and the joy of ‘the give and take’ resounds as we share in the food that feeds the soul.

The garden-inspired creations we make also bring a lot of creativity and joy, such as learning about the medicinal qualities of plants and making the calendula balms, working together to weave palm baskets inspired from ancient practices, and collecting produce, herbs and flowers for pickling.

Collaborating in The Garden, provides rich embodied learning, and teaches the value of living in a relationship with nature. That is an ecology lesson in action.

AIDAN’S INTENTION IN GROWING THE GARDEN

Rather than memorising gardening rules and complicated compost construction, I prefer a simple approach to creating a garden- informed by an attentive observation of nature. This method is flexible and empowering; able to bend to the conditions and not requiring difficult science. It is also a good way of teaching gardening to kids.

The beds were created in a circular fashion for a few reasons. Living School’s Founder, John Stewart, had sketched an initial rough design of the garden laid out in a circle. I thought this was a wonderful idea. Once the plants have grown up, it means you can’t see in a straight line from the beginning of a row to the end. As you walk through, your view is obstructed by plants around the bend, so there are mysteries waiting around every corner.

The Garden is located right at the top of a hill. Having the beds in a circular path ensures they roughly follow the contours of this hill. This lets each row absorb as much water and nutrients as possible, and minimises erosion.

And there is the symbol of the circle, reflective of how a garden works, and one of the school's core values.

I layered cow poo, compost and mulch on top of the soil much like a Tiramisu. The small (beetles, worms) and the very small (micro-organisms) living things digest this layered mass and transform it into rich, abundant soil.

As Edie in year 2 was heard to say:

“How about the mulch could be chocolate biccies for the garden?”

“Gives it food and the poo is chocolate and chocolate biscuits is the meal.”

For me, it’s helpful to think of ways that nature tops its soil up. In a forest, leaf litter falls (mulch). Animals wander through, eating and then pooing (manure) and fruits and other fallen bits of trees decompose (compost).

There was so much ‘rich learning’ in explaining this method to the kids.

How our garden beds began

Today

ANNA’S INTENTION FOR the LSKG canteen, JABAY

There is so much more to food than tasting and eating it. For a start, it is what keeps us alive. I see my role in the Living School kitchen as key to the development of the palates of the students at this school for pleasure and also health. It is an educational role through exposing the children to foods with properties rich in ingredients that feed their growing bodies and developing minds. The art of food is also an art of science.

For instance, this week I blanched and added the Okinawa and Brazilian spinach to the basil coming out of the LSKG and made a pesto.

Okinawa spinach is known as the “cholesterol spinach” due to its potential cholesterol-lowering properties. It’s rich in iron, protein, potassium, calcium and vitamin A.

Brazilian spinach is rich in B carotene, vitamin C, iron, calcium and also has a high level of folic acid and, is high in fiber.

Basil is also full of nutrients and is anti-inflammatory and contains antioxidants. It’s antibacterial and aids digestion. Plus, it’s known to boost mental health, reduce anxiety, improve mood and enhance cognitive function.

I figure if the kids learn to love these ingredients from a young age, they are set up for life.

ONLAND LEARNING AT LIVING SCHOOL

Next week, we bring you what happened with the kids in our first couple of weeks in the kitchen and garden for 2025! Come join our growing experience and take in Anna’s Living Recipes.