Subscribe

Donate

Contact

So you’re enjoying your tomato harvest, slicing them up with some fresh basil and relishing in all the flavours of summer, and we want to talk about winter crops? Yes, that’s right, we do! We want to bust the myth that food growing and harvesting is a summer activity. Our Kitchen Garden program runs all year round and with some strategic planning we’re able to yield bountiful crops all year, allowing the seed to plate experience to continue in schools throughout the winter months. 

So what’s the secret to tending a pumping garden in winter? Reuben, our 24 Carrot Gardens Operations Manager, asked two of our Garden Specialists, Jimmy Corrigan and Kachina Lucas, what their top tips are for winter gardening.

Jimmy and Kachina have years of experience behind them. Jimmy has been working in horticulture for more than 10 years and has been with 24 Carrot Gardens for over 2 years, working at Bayview Secondary College and Kingston High School. Kachina grew up in a community where everyone grew their own food, and went on to run a market garden before joining 24 Carrot Gardens over 2 years ago. Like Jimmy, Kachina has been working across 2 different schools, Bayview Secondary College and Clarendon Vale Primary School.

While your friends are at the beach this summer, consider spending a little time tending to your garden while dreaming of a winter full of abundance! 

Yes it’s summer, but we want to talk about your winter garden!

We brought our school workshops back to our home base at Material Institute’s ‘Botanical’ in Bridgewater, Tasmania for the second half of 2024, offering students hands-on experiences in the kitchen, clay studio, and our Beauty Lab.

Our Southern Primary School Coordinator, Sarah ‘Sharky’ Betts, helps to organise these excursions with our participating primary schools. After the bus arrives, Sharky gathers everyone together for an Acknowledgement of Country and a site safety induction before organising the students into groups for the three activities.

In the pop-up kitchen with our chef Vlad, students learn essential cooking techniques, with each group contributing to a different component of the day’s shared meal. The menu this term featured Vietnamese rice paper rolls, soba noodle salad, and crispy Korean pancakes. Many hands were chopping and wrapping all day to create the vibrant, delicious rainbow lunch.

“I learned that if you're cutting a capsicum that you have to use the fists, like you have to claw it so you don’t cut your fingers.” 

— Maisey, Clarendon Vale Primary School

In the clay studio, there’s always a calm, focused energy as students shape their own mugs, carefully sculpting handles, rims, and decorative details. Our Ceramic Artist, Georgie bisque-fires, glazes, and re-fires each piece before returning them to students as a tangible reminder of their creativity and a functional keepsake they can cherish for years to come.

“My favourite activity was pottery because you could make whatever you want and I liked making the mug. I made an octopus ... I was in the first cooking group. We did the rice paper rolls. I tried them at lunch time, I liked it but my favourite part of lunch was probably the noodles.  I hadn’t tried them before and I hadn’t tried the avocado. It was good!” 

We offer students hands-on experiences in the kitchen, clay studio, and our Beauty Lab.

Last year we celebrated an amazing milestone coming into our 10th year of operation. While this is an immense achievement it highlights some realities; most 24 Carrot Gardens in southern primary schools share the same age (roughly 10 years old). We want to ensure that our legacy schools continue to be in full bloom now and into the future. 

With this in mind we made the decision to upgrade the design and infrastructure of these older gardens, designing and tailoring to each school’s needs with our 10 years of learnings in mind. These learnings include looking at the kitchen garden as a living classroom. Through this lens we have brought in a few practicalities that enable the Garden Specialists, who are crucial in delivering the 24 Carrot program, to spend their time educating students rather than maintaining a garden that is always on the cusp of a weed takeover.  

We want to ensure that our legacy schools continue to be in full bloom now and into the future. 

We checked in to see how our school gardens and kitchens were going now spring is blooming! If you need any gardening and cooking inspiration, then you have come to the right place. There is some incredible produce and deliciousness being cooked up all around the state in our 24 Carrot Garden schools!

At Springfield Gardens Primary School, our Kitchen Specialist Kate, has been cooking cabbage, broccoli, silverbeet, radish and carrot Okonomiyaki with nori seaweed and carrot noodles with the students. Yum!

We checked in to see how our school gardens and kitchens were going now spring is blooming!

It turned out we scheduled our biggest event of the year during the week (or two) of wild weather Tasmania experienced at the end of winter! 💨💨💨 We didn't want anyone to blow away, so we rescheduled, and our Winterfest 24 is now... SPRinterFest 24! And it’s happening this Saturday 12th October.
Come along and visit our home Botanical as we celebrate with Connected Beginnings on the Kutalayna/Jordan River foreshore. ⁠We have a full day of fun activities planned — free food, live music, arts, crafts and more! ⁠

We have some very talented musicians and performers performing on Saturday, and to find out a little bit more about them we chatted with Kyesha from Geneslave, a local band who is playing. 

Connected Beginnings and us are excited to present! SPRinterFest 24!

Spring has finally sprung our chef Vlad can’t stop pesto-ing everything! We thought we would try and corner him for a recipe of his spring pesto... it's ever evolving but last week at Bond Place in Gagebrook this is what he used! Who knew you could pesto brassica flowers?

The recipe was a hit with the community at Bond Place and some like Kaiden were gobbling it up. How good! Vlad is a master at weaving in all the healthy greens and making them delicious #greensbystealth

Spring has finally sprung our chef Vlad can’t stop pesto-ing everything!

Earlier this winter we checked in with two of our north west Tasmanian primary schools to see how their newly finished gardens have bloomed!

East Devonport Primary School was buzzing with activity, with the kinders buddying up with year sixes to plant the herb — and pollinator — garden. East Devonport’s brand new perennial garden features a beautiful outdoor classroom with sandstone seating and timber arbor which will be trained with grapevines for summer shade; stepping stones winding their way through a food forest with native edibles, herbs, fruits and flowers; a sandstone yarning circle; polytunnel for year-round food production; an excellent self stirring (worm-powered) compost setup; and loads of enthusiastic students who have already been enjoying pizza with veggies and ‘green sprinkles’ from the garden!

It’s a crisp August morning at Kingston High and the garden is humming! 

A year on from the garden’s establishment, it’s exciting to see thriving winter crops — beets, brassicas and an abundance of leafy greens — and to behold student-led improvements to our original garden design — timber work benches, a vegetable wash station and a terracotta-paved communal dining area, to name just a few. 
The polytunnel is a jungle of climbing snow peas, and the bushfood corner is soon to become home to a new Flow beehive.

As students arrive for their weekly garden session, there is a sense of rhythm and routine. Students check in with Garden Specialists Nadia Danti and Jimmy Corrigan, before dispersing into smaller teams to carry out their garden roles. Ava, Ruby and Lacey have shared a weekly produce list with the school kitchen and taken note of their order. Together, they harvest carrots, silverbeet, beetroot and hakurei turnips, washing and crating them up for delivery back to the kitchen where they’ll make their way into cooking class recipes and canteen offerings. In exchange, the kitchen sorts its food scraps into buckets for composting. Angus collects these buckets once full, delivering them back to the garden’s composting hub. Here, a variety of compost systems — bays, bins, and worm farms — teach students how waste can be transformed back into rich, fertile soil. It's a satisfying cycle.

It’s a crisp August morning at Kingston High and the garden is humming! A year on from the garden’s establishment, it’s exciting to see thriving winter crops — beets, brassicas and an abundance of leafy greens.

24 Carrot Gardens program manager Kris McCarthy in conversation with Thibaut Favier, 24 Carrot Garden specialist at Austins Ferry & Kingston Primary Schools.

We all feel it- the warmth in the air is teasing us and the plants, and urging us to get growing! We asked Thibaut Favier, expert 24C garden specialist, what he’s doing with the students in the garden now to prepare for the warm months ahead, and how he manages spring fever- the temptation to plant all the vegetables because it’s finally warming up!

The cold days are nearly past, and it’s time to move on from winter. Thibaut prefers to grow big brassicas like cabbages, cauliflowers and broccoli, and root crops like carrots throughout the cold months. “All our winter vegetables were planted in summer & early autumn, and as the days get longer, our overwintered crops will start to bolt (go to flower).” Thibaut says. He and the students are now pulling them out, leaving a few to flower for the pollinators.

Springtime is a time to change things up in the garden, and dream of the joys that only summer offers- fragrant tomatoes warmed by the sun, beans that climb to the sky, crunchy cucumbers and zucchinis growing before the students’ eyes!

Our program manager Kris McCarthy chats with Thibaut Favier, 24 Carrot Garden specialist at Austins Ferry & Kingston Primary Schools to give you some expert tips on Spring garden prep!

The origin story of 24 Carrot Gardens is as much about why and when it started, as it is about where it’s going, and its generative social impact.

I have often reflected on how Kirsha and I grew up in different parts of the world, united by island geography: Guam, a US Island Territory in the western Pacific, and King Island, in the heart of the Roaring 40s in Bass Strait, Lutruwita/Tasmania. Our childhood experiences and relationship with food on those islands expanded across the two extremes of food culture. From the abundance of a veggie patch that was, at my home, bigger than the house I grew up in, to a reliance on mass produced, highly processed foods shipped hundreds of miles to back fill familial kitchen pantries.

These extremes are not only still evident today, but exist across a growing divide. The 24 Carrot Gardens program addresses this by designing, building and running kitchen garden programs in school communities across the state.

The seeds of 24 Carrot Gardens were sown decades ago, and its true beginnings can be traced back to New Orleans, USA. It was there that Kirsha’s immersion in the culture, arts and community catalysed her thinking on a deeper systems awareness of food. Spending over a decade there, she witnessed firsthand the transformative impact of youth engaging in the cultivation of food and the culinary arts. This experience would later inspire her as she relocated to a new island home on the other side of the world, and started working directly with schools.

The origin story of 24 Carrot Gardens is as much about why and when it started, as it is about where it’s going, and its generative social impact. I have often reflected on how Kirsha and I grew up in different parts of the world...

Learning to grow and cook fresh food is transformative. It connects us with ourselves, the natural world and our communities. At 24 Carrot Gardens, we want all young people to feel empowered to cultivate a positive food culture, and we’ve started in the communities that need it most.

Since breaking ground in 2014, we have reached over 4,100 young people through our kitchen garden program. Each student that encounters the program is engaged over multiple years of their school life. We now grow, cook and share seasonal food in 24 schools across Lutruwita / Tasmania, with over 260 hours of hands-on learning happening every week, led by 41 skilled and passionate educators — our Garden and Kitchen Specialists! 

We have celebrated at 7 Carnivals and hosted more than 100 interdisciplinary workshop days, weaving together seasonal food with art, music, science and beauty — because learning is more fun when it’s creative and inquiry-led. We have tended hundreds of compost heaps, sown thousands of seeds, harvested countless kilos of wondrously wonky produce and turned it into delicious meals to enjoy together.

We love to see students observing seasonal change, nurturing plants, building gross motor skills, discovering new interests, gaining confidence, trying new foods, sharing with friends, and coming back for seconds (and thirds!).

Learning to grow and cook fresh food is transformative. It connects us with ourselves, the natural world and our communities.

As part of our 10 year celebration we chatted with Ryan Marshall about his experience in the 24 Carrot Gardens program and how it has impacted his life, education and career. 

We took Ryan back to Moonah Primary School where he was a student at the inception of the 24 Carrot Gardens program. One of our Program Managers, Kris McCarthy, spoke with Ryan about how the program influenced his life and view of food systems. They then ventured to Montrose Bay High School to learn more about Ryan’s experience re-joining the program as a 24 Carrot Gardens Garden Specialist, before finishing up the afternoon with a tour of Ryan’s thriving home garden in the Derwent Valley.

What is now the 24 Carrot Garden site at Moonah Primary School was once a bare paddock, without a fruit tree or raised garden bed in sight. The school kitchen and garden was advocated for by the Principal of MPS at the time, Ange Miezitis. As a result of Ange’s vision and resolve, MPS received a grant in 2009 from Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation (SAKGF) for two years worth of funding. The garden was established and Moonah Primary became a demonstration school in Lutruwita/Tasmania, pioneering the way for the kitchen and garden education movement for the whole of the state. 

Ryan Marshall was in Grade 3 at MPS when the garden was built and spent four years participating in the kitchen garden program before moving for high school. Although he didn’t know it at the time, the program ignited his curiosity and love of gardening and cooking immensely.  

“The [school] garden sparked my interest in the food and garden world,” Ryan shared, “and the program influenced my outlook on healthy food immensely.” He fondly recalled working alongside the volunteers and specialists in the school garden, cooking in the kitchen and then coming together at the end of the lesson to eat together. Ryan elaborated further and shared another standout memory with us, one of a celebrity chef dinner, where he and other students helped to cook and serve a meal alongside a celebrity chef for local community members and politicians.  

Since the funding agreement between SAKGF and Moonah Primary ceased in 2011, the celebrity chef dinners were a regular occurrence as a fundraiser for the school’s kitchen garden program. 24 Carrot Gardens founder, Kirsha Kaechele, attended one of these events and connected with Ange Miezitis, which subsequently provided inspiration for beginning the 24 Carrot Gardens program. You can read the 24 Carrot Gardens origin story here.

As part of our 10 year celebration we chatted with Ryan Marshall about his experience in the 24 Carrot Gardens program and how it has impacted his life, education and career.

6 handfuls baby spinach- chopped if large 

Prepare the vegetables, finely dice onions, slice carrots and dice pumpkin into 1-2 cm cubes, top the beans and slice into bite size pieces

Prepare the cauliflower coconut milk. Roughly chop the cauliflower, blend with the coconut milk and stock until smooth-ish. 

Heat oil in a large pot, sauté onion until softened and just starting to become golden. 

Add tomato paste and spice mix to the onion, cook for a minute or 2 until fragrant

Add the carrot and pumpkin, stir so they are coated in the paste and spice mix

Add the blended coconut and cauliflower, beans and chickpeas, season, stir and bring to a simmer. 

Cover and simmer until veggies are tender

Remove lid and stir through the spinach and lime, season if necessary  

Our chef Vlad shares his deliciously popular pumpkin and chickpea curry 24 Carrot students cooked as part of their deeper learning of 'Seeds' in last terms workshops.

We’re a tad excited - our favourite community hub Bond Place is back with an expansive nature play area, edible food garden and a flash new outdoor classroom.

Bond Place: The ❤️Beat of Gagebrook Returns!

With warmer days ahead, we say a huge thank you to the 213 brave participants who took to the icy waters as part of this winter’s Ladies Who Jump event. Registrations doubled this year and we closed out the campaign with an incredible $302,628 raised for 24 Carrot Gardens!

Thanks to the generosity of participants and their friends, families and communities, more students across the state will enjoy, grow, cook and share fresh, seasonal food. The funds raised are already being put to good use, helping to grow the program in the north and northwest and supporting our established school gardens with additional staffing and equipment upgrades. 

If you missed out on donating to this campaign we accept donations all year round via our donate page.

With warmer days ahead, we would like to say a huge thanks to everyone who braved the icy waters for this winter’s Ladies Who Jump event. We doubled last year’s registrations...

Our student workshop program at Botanical in Bridgewater is in full swing for spring, with groups from our 24 Carrot schools visiting each week for a series of learning-by-doing sessions. This term, students have hand-dyed fabrics with natural indigo, created beauty products with everyday ingredients and rolled up their sleeves to help in the market garden.

No 24 Carrot workshop would be complete without a shared lunch — prepared by the students, of course! Our Chef Vladimir Panevin has shared his recipe for Spinach and Ricotta Gnocchi with us, a menu favourite from this season’s workshops. It is quick and easy to prepare, and completely delicious. We served ours with garlic flatbread and a colourful garden salad and we thought we would share it with you — enjoy!

No 24 Carrot workshop would be complete without a shared lunch — prepared by the students, of course! Our Chef Vladimir Panevin has shared his recipe for Spinach and Ricotta Gnocchi with us, a menu favourite from this season’s workshops.

Vlad's Gnocchi - From the 24 Carrot Kitchen

On the cusp of delivering our new garden design with the community of Ravenswood Heights Primary School, we caught up with Rosa Virgo and Adam Holmstrom our long-term collaborators from Inspiring Place.

Working in landscape architecture and environmental planning, Inspiring Place are committed to community-led garden design as a way of delivering abundance and impact.  

Hi Rosa and Adam – can you tell us about your collaborative approach to community-led garden design?

We listen and learn from the environment and people. The garden design process always starts with students, teachers, families, community members and grounds people. Who turns up at the ‘birthing’ stage and the first few meetings is really important. 

This shapes how the project will be realised. We love using creative ways of exploring and witnessing the physical site including site walks and interactions that help us observe and understand the ways in which people interact with what is already there. Landscape elements can have surprising uses. We find dense established plantings are really loved as they provide playful spaces as well as sheltered areas for mindful reflection.

These activities are then complimented by conversations as to what makes for a good kitchen garden (including things like the type of plants, sun position and access to water). We invite people to share ideas through writing, drawing and verbalising a vision for the garden. 

We always stay true to practical ideas for example, plants that can be used in the kitchen. We’ve found Italian herbs are a favourite as they work well in lots of dishes and recipes. In East Devonport, locally sourced kelp is used in the compost to make the garden thrive. Some schools have incorporated materials found around the school like old bathtubs and sinks, others have used class time in other subjects to make structures and work benches. 

How does this approach impact the community and outcomes?

Creating space for multiple needs, voices and insights means increased opportunity for ownership and ingenuity. We like to leave the door and invitation to be involved wide open. This means the whole school – students, teachers, volunteers and community contribute ideas. 

We’ve found this approach gives the garden a reach beyond the garden bed. For example how the garden physically connects to other areas of the school, how produce grown in a school garden can be made available to the wider community and how the garden relates to other food programs in the neighbourhood. 

Healthy eco-systems include healthy environments and humans. As well as looking at healthy soil and produce, we look to where we can create healthy communities. Our next big dream is to support 24 Carrot in their exploration of integrated training and experiences that lead to traineeships and qualifications in horticulture. 

What is your top piece of advice for people who are keen to establish a productive garden?

We would suggest to establish a productive patch, to invest time, energy and most of all, compost, into building healthy, living soil first!

On the cusp of delivering our new garden with the community of Ravenswood Heights Primary School, we caught up with Rosa Virgo and Adam Holmstrom our long-term collaborators from Inspiring Place.

A Botanical market garden update from Lou Sales our Horticulturalist 

Winter is well and truly here at Botanical and we’ve had some pretty hard frosts over the past week. There is not much you can plant at this time of year (even the weeds slow down!) giving us a welcome break from garden maintenance tasks and the opportunity to get stuck into some major garden development.

We’ve built a new garden and food forest to complement our community site at Bond Place, which is due to be completed in August. We are also constructing a garden for our new Beauty Lab at Botanical. This will include a range of plants that we’ll use in our beauty products - such as kunzea, tea tree, dog rose, rosemary, lavender, camomile, lemon balm, mint, aloe vera and pig face. Today we are harvesting calendula, rosemary, lime balm, lavender and lemon grass to dry out ready for our first Beauty Lab workshop at the Winterfest on 30th June.

Many of these plants have the added benefit of being great for beneficial pollinators and our resident bees. We tucked our bees up in bed ready for winter last month, with a full box of honey per hive to keep them going over the cold winter months. We also reduced the size of our hive entrances to keep our cold drafts and to help prevent honey robbing by mice and wasps.

Since we are not growing many seedlings at the moment, we’ve temporarily converted part of our seedling raising area into a mushroom growing chamber and have been teaching visiting school groups how to grow grey oyster mushrooms in tubs. If you are keen to give mushroom growing a go too, I’d highly recommend Milkwood Permaculture’s Free Growing Guide to get you started. They also have a great online course for those wanting to learn more.

Winter is also a great time to take hardwood cuttings. Over the coming weeks we’ll be taking grape cuttings to give to our schools and the local community. If you want to have a go at taking cuttings yourself, Goodlife Permaculture have some easy to follow instructions on their website here.

Our new apprentice Travis is particularly interested in growing fruit trees, so we intend to expand our orchard this winter, moving and planting trees during their dormant season. We’ll use espalier techniques to squeeze in as many trees as we can including plums, cherries, pears, nectarines and peaches. We are looking forward to being able to share the produce with our schools in years to come.

Note: Lou Sales is our Horticulturalist who looks after our 1 acre market garden in Bridgewater, Lutruwita/Tasmania. Botanical produces hundreds of kilos of produce for our schools, community and food banks along with thousands of seedlings to keep our school gardens fruitful all year round.

Winter is well and truly here at Botanical and we’ve had some pretty hard frosts over the past week.

The ladies are jumping again this 24th June.

Our fearless founder Kirsha Kaechele is at it again! Ladies Who Jump is on back on this year and the fundraising goal is bigger than ever! $300,000 to fund our 24 Carrot Gardens program in Tasmanian schools.

It’s that time of year again, when brave ‘ladies’ (whatever that means for you) take the plunge into Tasmania’s icy waters to raise funds for 24 Carrot Gardens!

Ladies Who Jump, this year held on 24 June, is your chance to rally a team together, get your kit off and to warm our hearts by generously donating to a great cause – healthy gardens, communities and schools across the state.  

Need inspiration? Last year’s team captains and jump veterans the Crispy Carrots, Taroona Tough Titties and the Bruny Island Ladies share their expert advice.

- Choose your preferred body of water based on accessibility, beauty and how public or private you prefer your plunge to be 

- Pick your time of day – plunging as the sun comes up is guaranteed to keep you invigorated for the rest of the day 

- Indulge in ‘spiked’ coffee for dutch courage and to get the blood moving through your body

- Shrieks, swear words and squeals are encouraged

- Remember it’s not how far you plunge that counts but that you plunged at all  

- A fire pot will bring warmth back to your bones post plunge

- Be prepared for the full body post dip tingle and glow 

- Let the thought of the 24 Carrot Gardens team and hundreds of Tasmanian kids and communities having access to healthy produce and gardens warm your heart!

Our fearless founder Kirsha Kaechele is at it again! Ladies Who Jump is on back on this year and the fundraising goal is bigger than ever! $300,000 to fund our 24 Carrot Garden program in Tasmanian schools.

2022 saw the serious expansion of 24 Carrot Gardens across Nipaluna (Hobart), in the north of the State and for the first time, in high schools. Together with our school communities, support from the Department of Education and our landscape design partners Inspiring Place and the University of Tasmania, our development team commenced a total of nine new transformation projects across the state.

Through listening to local knowledge and encouraging the creativity of students, educators, families and the school community, we collaborate to envisage how under-used spaces can be transformed into beautiful and productive living landscapes. Environments that bring beauty and offer a valuable contribution to the education curriculum through learning that occurs by growing, harvesting and cooking fresh produce. 

Each site responds to place and people and is as unique as the community who has imagined and developed it. Together we design, problem solve, dream, construct, plant and through conversations of care, communities connect and take ownership  of these future ecologies. 

With more sites to transform in 2023, we are energised and inspired by the number of schools and communities now reaching out to us and expressing their interest in being part of a vibrant food culture and establishing gardens filled with delicious produce. We continue our fundraising efforts to support and enable the establishment of more school gardens. 

More gardens in more schools and communities means more access to delicious produce. More gardens make stronger community connections, generate better health outcomes and develop moments of collaboration and celebration. We believe communities with vibrant food cultures have strong futures. 

We’re looking forward to planting more seeds of radical renewal and growing a vibrant food culture across in Lutruwita in 2023!

A huge thank you to our generous and growing network of funders, volunteers, collaborators and the nine schools who joined us in 2022:

Department for Education, Children & Young People

University of Tasmania (School of Architecture and Design)

Jordan River Learning Federation Senior School

2022 saw the serious expansion of 24 Carrot Gardens across nipaluna (Hobart), in the north of the State and for the first time, in high schools.

From asphalt to wonderground: sowing seeds of radical renewal across Lutruwita.

Here's some stuff we've been up to lately.

Stories

Yes it’s summer, but we want to talk about your winter garden!

A look into our Primary School Workshops

Our Garden Redevelopments