Term 2 Growing Passions

 
Just as summer winds down the business of getting stuck into the garden as a community heats up. The air is cooler, making for an even better time in the garden to 'dig in'. HalindaGreen has continued to grow. It's harvest is getting richer. We thought that maybe our passionfruit vine was empty rootstock. But the plant has fruited. It came as a lovely surprise.

Josh's Dad Helps Out

Wednesdays are open days for parents and community members who want to contribute to the garden at Halinda.

Josh's Dad came in this week to help out with the maintenance of the plants, garden beds and watering. Feel free to come in and spend a half hour, or even longer if you wish, on Wednesday mornings from 9:30 onwards.

We can even arrange other days and times for the really keen.

It is a lovely way to contribute to the life of the local community.
Thankyou to our friends and helpers who do so much for us.

HalindaGreen Gets Cooking

Bianca, Project manager for the Melbourne based but now expanding Australia wide Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Project paid a visit to HalindaGreen today.

HalindaGreen is working on establishing our pavilion kitchen garden on the Green.



http://www.kitchengardenfoundation.org.au/

Open School Community Garden Wednesdays

It's all systems go with our school community garden. Our first community garden morning went well with P&C and staff sharing time digging, weeding, enjoying the garden and talking about growing things ! A good day





First day of the school community garden Open Wednesdays project.

Liz Smith (pictured) our community liason worked with parents and made great headway clearing garden beds and working around trees. Parents enjoyed getting their hands dirty, pitching in making the garden an even better place to be for their children.
The garden is open every Wednesday for Community members to come up and help out, see the garden grow, enjoy the outdoors and see the kids at work in the outdoor classrooom.

All We Need Now Is ...

The development of a kitchen pavillion will make HalindaGreen a showcase in the Western Sydney Region and further afield.

The Public School system of NSW can be proud of the achievements of our students to make this garden something special. They have worked with community members to build a garden in difficult circumstances. A hot and windy piece of neglected soil is becoming richer with every season. Garden beds have expanded, provided meals for community parents and citizens and continue to flourish despite limitations of resources. And all of this happened in the first year of HalindaGreen !

One significant example of limitations on resources though, is that all of our efforts have been successful despite the fact that we have NO TANKS !

[We posted about our eligibility for a tankvoucher a year or so back]

Halindagreen carers and students have had to be 'pretty resourceful' to find water enough for the green. We look forward to the day when we can judiciously water our own school garden with liquid joy from our own tanks. We are hoping that we can find a way to be a worthy NSW showcase garden with an adequate water scheme to show for the needs of our special needs students.

Sustainability is the next step !

We are a Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Showcase School !!!

THE KITCHEN IS COMING !
The big news is we are innovators in our region. We have qualified for membership of a very special group of schools around the world! One of only 47 school gardens selected from places all over the globe, for inclusion in the 2010 program to fund and promote a kitchen garden and food skills for students.

We will be working with communities to use these resources to make a very special place out on our school garden 'HalindaGreen'.

Our school community garden initiative is due to ramp up production over the next growing season and the Stephanie Alexander Program will fit our needs exceptionally well. With this success we can now have a kitchen pavillion in our garden !

Mrs T's 'Taters

Mrs T, our venerable SLSO gardener, a busy brilliant contributer to HalindaGreen has been using every inch of space at school to plant crops. She has made use of the sun against a northern facing wall of Juniors block, outside the air-conditioning yard. Hessian sacks are filled with soil and potatos are growing like topsy !