Gardening

The gardening programme is broadly aimed at taking students through sequences in plant life, from small annuals to perennial trees, in harmony with the inner development taking place in the students themselves. As well as learning to observe and recognize the interrelated cycles and qualities of the seasons, the students perform mainly hands-on, practical work. This varies from compost-making to propagating, seed sorting, preparing herbs and dried flowers for sale and many other activities.

The Gardening Teacher can work closely with the Class Teachers, often amplifying some aspect of the Main Lesson work - Botany, Climatology, Geology - with gardening activities. The students, for example, produce red cabbage for acid/alkaline experiments; grapes for fermentation and alcohol study; dye resources for craft; basket-making materials (iris leaf, corn husk, vine, Watsonia etc); oil infusions from herbs for home medicine making in Chemistry; vegetables for cooking; gourds for painting still-life; grains for nutrition study. The gardens are used extensively as a resource.

It is important to give the students as real a picture as possible of diverse aspects of work on the land, encouraging them to become imaginative and ecologically aware, whilst at the same time encouraging them to learn about the sustainable use of the soil and the reality of making a living off the land.

The gardening program works with Bio-Dynamic principles and practices. Certain key activities (e.g. compost making) are returned to each year and the level of understanding increased by more in-depth practice.

Overall emphasis is placed on the repetition of certain practices which develop sense-observation skills for recognising and working with interrelated cycles and qualities of the seasons / soil / plants / animals / insects / birds / celestial bodies and the human organism.

The course takes place over 5 week blocks in each of the seasons. Each weekly lesson lasts for about 80 minutes.

In excessive heat or rain, indoor work - for example: propagating, tending tools, seed sorting, preparing herbs and dried flowers for sale - is undertaken. Current facilities include a small workshop / classroom area, a toolshed, a nursery with seeding shed, shaded outdoors work-bench areas and a propagation tunnel.

One and a half acres have been set out to orchards, a herb garden, an edible arboretum, berry patches, grainfields, intensive flower and vegetable gardens and a woodlot. Lessons are almost entirely hands-on, with minimal blackboard and written work.