As featured in AEON Magazine

The Garden team is increasingly making more use of the resources that are available on the campuses and among the teacher, staff and parent bodies.

We now collect food waste on campuses via several successful compost bins and heaps. At our school canteen, we collect the vegetable scraps and coffee grounds and in turn, supply the canteen with herbs and other embellishments.

Working Bees have taken place at the Preschool, Castlecrag and Middle Cove campuses, to make our necessary compost for nourishing the garden beds. This has been a great opportunity for parents, teachers and children to learn how to make a compost pile and to learn about the preparations that are unique to Biodynamics.

The maintenance team and grounds keepers regularly bring us leaves from all three campuses to support the carbon needed for the compost making. Thus we are practicing sustainability on our campuses by not sending the leaves off to green waste and buying back compost.

At this year’s Family Fair, we worked towards a more sustainable environment by making compost onsite on the day with all the food and coconuts and paper products from the Fair, with two other Steiner schools photographing our efforts for their own use at their fairs!

At Middle Cove, parents and children of Class 3 made manure concentrate. The mixture was buried in a specially prepared pit under the soil for a 10-week maturing time. It was then decanted and distributed for future use to fertilise our community’ own gardens.

In July, our Middle Cove garden hosted two Biodynamic workshops for the International Vital Years Early Childhood conference. Thirty teachers created a compost pile and made fertilisers for the garden. They look forward to taking these skills to their own schools now.