Community focus with Taranaki school’s edible Kai Garden

Students and teachers at Inglewood Primary School in New Plymouth recently completed a new edible garden as one of ten winners in last year’s Keep New Zealand Beautiful Kai Garden Competition.

The competition gives schools and ECEs from across the country the opportunity to create a small kai or rongoā garden to help their students develop a greater understanding of the natural world and to gain hands-on experience gardening for their school.

The new Food Forest, designed and built by students from the school’s Student-Led, Design and Environmental Studies (SLIDES) class, utilises an otherwise undeveloped patch of grass and is designed to help tamariki “learn how to create and uphold a sustainable food forest where we can reduce, reuse and recycle as much as possible,” says Claire Suter, teacher at Inglewood Primary School.

“Our purpose for this project is to be able to provide healthy food for those who may need some kai within our school and wider community, plus it will be a place to learn, reflect and pay it forward.

“Our end goal is that we will be able to propagate, grow, nurture, harvest and gift or sell our fruit and vegetables to the community,” Claire says.

Using repurposed materials including wood offcuts, roofing iron and even old biodegradable carpet, the Food Forest includes a wide variety of citrus fruit trees and berry bushes, herbs such as basil and rosemary, as well as cruciferous vegetables (cauliflower and broccoli) and leafy greens (spinach), much of which has only recently been planted. The Food Forest also has a small garden shed from which rainwater is collected for the garden, and both sensory and calming areas are being developed.

With the new 2024 school year having just begun and with the main fruit trees now planted, the students will also set up a roster to take care of and learn from the garden. Weeding, checking the soil, checking for unwanted pests and helping propogate the seddlings will be tasks for all tamariki, with a tuakana teina strategy — a te ao Māori ‘buddy system’ that pairs older and younger students — to ensure knowledge gets passed on. Claire adds, “we will have an environmental club who meet at break times to plan, design and implement anything required to make the Food Forest a continued success.”

More info about our Kai Garden Competition can be found here.