Our goal

The students in infant and junior classes get to care for and learn about lovely fresh herbs. They can take herbs home to use in cooking with their families. Hopefully this will plant a seed (!) in our youngest students about the satisfaction that comes from growing your own food and it is an opportunity for teachers to talk about how we can reduce our ecological footprint and live more sustainably by growing our own food rather than importing it. In Singapore we currently import over 92% of our own food!

A collaborative project with East

Where were we going to get the herbs for our planters? We haven’t got enough in our own gardens, growing from seed is quite a fiddly process and we are busy weeding and managing our own gardens. Buying the herbs would be expensive. The East HS Propagation team came to our rescue! They are a new HS College service who take orders for plants and then grow them for people in the community. 

Making the towers

Meanwhile we needed to get stuck in with making the towers. Last Wednesday we went to Andy’s (head gardener) garden with Nathan (Director of Sustainability) to see how we could recycle old pots to make our towers. Our team worked to create their own designs. We came up with a couple of our own versions of ‘The Tower’ using the materials we had, and Tebo and Koko taught the team how to mix up the potting compost using soil, sand and mulch. The students worked tirelessly, dividing themselves up into ‘pot sourcers’ (who found pots the right size and tried to avoid the ants and spiders); the ‘construction crew’ (who built the towers); the ‘washing team’ (who washed the pots); and the ‘soil gang’ (who made up the soil and filled the towers). We made 24 herb towers in 1 service session and are now ready for the herbs to arrive!