Click on the green title or bullet topics to go to site.
How to Start a School Garden
- How to Start a School Garden – Your Complete Guide
- Garden for Learning guide book – Creating and Sustaining Your School Garden – A comprehensive guide developed by experts to be a must-have resource for anyone starting or enhancing school gardens.
- Getting Schooled in the Garden
- Steps to a School Garden
- Loci Environment and Place – Sustainable Design in Schools – The benefits of nature and sustainable design in school grounds is proven to help students learn. Loci is sharing systems, templates and programs to make sustainable design much easier to implement.
- Garden Lesson Plan: Many elements are interconnected and function together to create the natural and productive living system that is your garden. Look to the end of this activity guide for additional lesson plans, activity guides, and videos that can help you bring together soil, water, habitat, food, and community to explore your dynamic garden ecosystem.
- How to get Kids Started with Gardening and Sustainability – Everything you need to help your children fall in love with home-grown food, exciting ornamental plants, wildlife and eco-friendliness in general.
- A Kids Guide to Gardening – links to different sites with kids gardening guides
- Gardening for Kids: Multiply websites with gardening essentials for starting a garden with children.
- Community Gardens: How to guides and information sheets from Community Gardens Australia
KidsGrow
Four themed gardens and practical tips for gardening at school.
- KidsGrow – Themed Gardens – Munch and Crunch Garden
- KidsGrow – Themed Gardens – Waterwise Sensory Maze
- Kidsgrow – Themed Gardens – Australian Habitat Haven
- KidsGrow – Themed Gardens – Seasonal Colour Garden
Vegetable Gardens
- KidsGrow – Themed Gardens – Munch and Crunch Garden
- Beginner’s Guide to Basic Gardening – A comprehensive guide to gardening containing everything you need to know about growing your own vegetables.
- Growing a Pizza Garden
- Create a Planting Calendar Planting Calendar Planting / Picking Calendar
- Gardenate – what you can plant now and what to prepare for next month.
- Building Your Own Vegetable Garden – An easy guide for setting up an urban garden.
Sensory Gardens
Sensory gardens provide intimate spaces where young children can be immersed in the scents, textures and colours of plants and related elements. These articles offers a range of suggestions on how to transform your own yard into a sensory delight.
- How to Create a Sensory Garden
- Seven Elements of Sensory Gardens
- Plant Selection for a Sensory Garden
- Garden for the Senses
Indigenous/Bush Tucker Gardens
- Tucker Bush – Browse Tucker Bush fruits, plants, herbs and spices, all tasty, attractive and easy to grow.
- Top 6 Bushfood Plants for School Gardens in Victoria
- Indigenous-Plant-Use – This booklet contains much information about resources for growing and exploring indigenous plants and has easily printable labels which people can put in https://edibleeden.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Edible-Eden-Top-6-bushfood-plants-for-school-gardens.pdfgarden as a way to continue their learning journey.
- Grow an Indigenous Garden – Growing indigenous and endemic plants in your yard helps extend remnant patches of native fauna, attracts native wildlife to your garden and conserves biodiversity. So get your hands dirty and enjoy the rewards.
Habitat Gardens
- Kidsgrow – Themed Gardens – Australian Habitat Haven
- Gardens for Wildlife – Gardens of all shapes and sizes can be wonderful places for wildlife. Find out about basic ingredients needed for a wildlife friendly garden.
- Creating a Wildlife Habitat in your Backyard – Habitat is a combination of food, water, shelter, and space arranged to meet the needs of wildlife. Even a small yard can be landscaped to attract birds, butterflies, beneficial insects, and small animals. Trees, shrubs, and other plants provide shelter and food for wildlife.
- Build a Wildlife Pond – Building a wildlife pond in your garden is one of the very best things you can do for the many creatures who visit your space. Having such a feature will increase biodiversity – increasing the range of plants and animals your garden can support.
- Frog Pond/Bog – How to build a frog bog or pond. Frog links: www.mybackyard.info/backyardblog www.frogs.org.au
- Flowers and plants to attract birds and other wildlife – There are also certain kinds of flowers and plants that can be used to get the attention of birds and other wildlife, including butterflies and insects that are beneficial to the garden.
Small Space Gardening
- Growing More in the Space you have – This video presents five tried-and-tested methods for getting more from the growing area you have.
- It’s Time to Grow Up – Not all schools have a lot of space, learn how to build and grow your own green walls and other vertical gardens to increase your school’s green space.
- Growing green roofs, walls and facades – Green roofs, walls and facades are becoming more common in cities across the globe. Growing numbers of Australians are realising the potential of these living systems to improve the quality of their built environment to provide social, aesthetic, environmental and economic benefits.
Pollinator Gardens
- Flowers for Bees – Guide for selecting the best Australia suited flowers and plants to benefit the bees, pollinators and your garden.
- How to plant a bee garden – By planting a bee garden, you too can do your part to help the bees and in return, they pollinate your flowers, providing a bountiful harvest of fruits, seeds and vegetables.
- Creating a Resilient Garden: with pollinators, good bugs, lizards and more!
- Creating Pollinator Gardens: One of the best things we can do to help these pollinators is to create pollinator gardens that attract them and give them a place to find food, reproduce, and experience safety from predators and from the elements.
Landscaping for Bushfires
- Landscaping for Bushfire – Garden design and plant selection
- Landscaping for bushfire prone areas – These guidelines by DET are designed to support school principals and childcare directors with bushfire preparations and emergency management plans.
Bees
- Beginner’s Guide to Beekeeping – This guide can kickstart your journey as a beekeeper, with useful information and tips including some frequently asked questions, to help any beginner welcome bees into their garden.
- Bee websites: www.honeybee.com.au www.honeybee.org.au www.aussiebee.com.au
- How to make a Bee Hotel – Construct this easy native bee hotel out of a tin can to increase the chances of native bees flying into your garden.
- Creating a Bee Hotel – Protecting our Pollinators – Costa teaches us how to protect our local pollinators, and why they are so important for the ecosystem.
Worm Farms/Composting
- How to Make a DIY Compost Bin – 13 easy builds for beginners
- The Beginner’s Guide to Worm Farms video – Everything you need to know about worm farms.
- Composting Food Waste: A Beginner’s Guide
- Build or Renovate a Worm Farm
- Make Great Compost – Get composting with Costa! Compost is great for your plants and the environment by saves food waste from landfill (and your school money) and creates nutrient rich material for your garden.
- Improve your Soil without a Compost Heap If you don’t have room for a compost bin, you can improve your garden soil using three kitchen scraps you’d normally throw away.
- How does a worm farm work? Costa teaches us about the wonderful world of worms, how they help in waste management and why they are so important for the ecosystem.
- Grillio’s Guide to Food Waste and Composting.
Chooks
- The Beginner’s Guide to Keeping Healthy, Happy Chickens video – A beginner’s guide to keeping happy and healthy chooks, plus a downloadable checklist, will get you asking all the ‘good questions’ you need to consider before you begin.
- Chook lookbook – Chickens not only provide us with eggs, but they are also champion composters, perfect pest control, living fertiliser factories, and pretty great pets.
Pruning Trees
- Prune Trees for a Better Harvest
- Pruning Guide – a basic guide for home gardeners
General ‘How to’ Information
- Gardening for Kids: Multiply websites with gardening essentials for starting a garden with children.
- Build raised garden bed – These free plans for beginners offer several designs in various shapes, sizes, and heights to suit a variety of growing spaces.
- Alive with learning Plant Propagation – This learning resource is intended to be used as a stand-alone information document to advise teachers on appropriate planting
techniques for different Australian Plants. - How to Propagate Plants in Water with Kids – learn the science of how plants propagate in water and how you can propagate plants like pothos, Chinese money plants, and spider plants.
- Propagating Plants With Kids: Teaching Plant Propagation To Children
- Raising Expectations – A guide to building raised gardening beds
- Build 15 easy DIY greenhouse projects
- Making a Mini Greenhouse, to Extend Your Growing Season
- Build a green bean teepee
- Fleming’s Top 10 Trees Guide
- Complete guide to growing your own organic food! – Simple steps to starting and maintaining your own organic garden.
- Backyard tree identification guide – This guide will help you identify your tree s by climate and classification.
- Seed Saving Basics & Starting Your Own Seed Bank video
- Investigating the food soil web – Soil is much more than just dirt. In this activity, our learners will be conducting an investigation to see which animals and other organisms are recycling nutrients in the garden. Learning activity by Junior Landcare.
- DIY Gardening Projects and Landscaping Ideas to Save Money – A variety gardening projects, including guides on growing flower gardens, herb gardens, vegetable gardens and fruit gardens.
- 10 Tips for Eco-Friendly Gardening– making just a few small changes to your private green space can have an impact far wider than you’d imagine.
Saving Money in the Garden
- Growing from your food scraps – This activity explores growing food from the ends and scraps of vegetables. Food that magically regrows itself from kitchen scraps
- Making newspaper seedling pots – Newspaper pots are great containers for starting seeds, allowing you to transplant seedlings straight into your garden at the start of the growing season.