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We chat to Lead Teacher, Michael James, who as well as championing the 24 Carrot Gardens program, is supporting much broader integration of the garden into Kingston High’s subjects and programs. From the school cafe, where students take up both cooking and front of house roles, through to MDT lessons where students design and build items for the garden using timber and metal donated by local businesses. Excitingly, after several years of trying to get a Horticulture subject going, there’s been an influx of interest this year with two classes successfully up and running. Michael estimates that across these different avenues of learning, around 200 students interact with the garden every week.

"The garden works!" he says, "For students, contributing to something, having an output and then being proud of it — it feels good. And they’re tired, or they’re hot, but they get so much out of it."

Interdisciplinary learning in the garden… keep it up Kingston High!

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.

In his school gardens Thibaut follows a planting plan to manage spring fever. “Where growing space is limited, I stagger the warm-season plantings, and I resist the urge to fill up all our beds in early spring. In the school gardens we often plant our tomatoes and other summer crops later- from October right through to December- because we want the peak of the summer harvest to occur when school returns in early February.”

In September, Thibaut will sow quick-growing crops like lettuce, Asian greens, radishes and Hakurei (Japanese turnip) which can be harvested before summer crops go in. “From mid-October, we’ll plant beans, sweetcorn, zucchini and pumpkins, and then cucumbers and melons after that.”

Soil care is at the heart of Thibaut’s school kitchen gardens. “I like to rest some of our garden beds. In autumn we sowed green manure (cover) crops to add carbon & nitrogen to the soil.” Now that the tall green manure crop is in flower, the students get the fun job of smashing the plants to the ground. “We’ll then tarp the bed, and leave it to break down until it’s time to plant our summer vegetables. Because of our later plantings, I like to keep the soil covered as temperatures rise. I lay old plants on the beds to feed and shade the beds, and to return carbon to the soil.”

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!

Kirsha Kaechele, Ange Miezitis, Jordan Harries, Reuben Parker-Greer 2014

Students and 24CG Program Manager Reuben Parker-Greer at Windermere Primary School 2014

Students are Glenorchy Primary School in 2014

Step forward to 2013. Several years after moving to Lutruwita/Tasmania, Kirsha connected with Angela Miezitis, then Principal of Moonah Primary School (MPS). Building on Ange’s expertise and experience in establishing the kitchen garden program at MPS, they hatched an ambitious plan to partner philanthropic funding with a handful of schools in Glenorchy with a simple and powerful vision: every school should have a kitchen garden.

Kirsha mused that if we could get DW* to sponsor the first school (Windermere Primary, less than 2km from MONA), other donors would follow. Using David's initial contribution as the carrot on the stick worked, and we soon had the resources to fund four schools, within months of starting.

Fundamental to the successful start-up of the project, was the establishment of a steering group and partnerships to guide project planning and development. Members included: Robert Sveen (Colony47), Marcus Ragus and Mark Fountain (Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens), Renate Hughes (Glenorchy City Council), Kirsha Kaechele and Angela Miezitis. This group provided hundreds of hours of volunteer time to advise and guide us in the first few years, for which we are eternally grateful.

Initially auspiced by the Royal Botanical Gardens from 2014 to 2015, we transitioned to an auspice relationship with Colony47 in 2016 — an arrangement that continued for six years. 

Between 2014 and 2021, the program grew from five to 17 schools, and in 2021, Kaechele

founded the charity Material Institute Lutruwita, to steward the program’s continued expansion bringing the current membership to 20 primary and four high schools statewide.

A special event at Bridgewater Community Centre in 2014!

Students in the garden at Kingston Primary in 2015

Students at Risdon Vale Primary pose for their photo in 2015

Students and teachers at Herdsmans Cove Primary School 2016

Moving forward, we would love to see the original vision come to fruition: a 24 Carrot Garden in every Tasmanian school. As we celebrate a decade of designing, building and running kitchen garden programs in Lutruwita, it would be easy to launch into planning for the next decade. But we know the real power of school kitchen garden programs is the flow-on impacts to health and student engagement —and this is what we want to focus our attention on as we continue to support and steward the program at our existing schools. Well, at least for the next year! 

In 2025, we’ll celebrate our journey so far with our stellar team of foodies, gardeners, teachers and artists including our program managers, Reuben Parker-Greer, Tamas Oszvald, Kristina McCarthy, Simon Dunne, Andy Rushton and Joanne Dean. We would also like to acknowledge our dear friends and peers who have come and gone from the 24 Carrot community: Tristan Bunker, Renate Hughes, Dr Bridgette Watts, and of course Steve Devereaux, Director of Projects at MONA.

While there have been many individuals and organisations that have been instrumental in bringing us this far, there are too many to name individually… it does indeed take a village!

Keep an eye out for further announcements on our 10th year events and celebrations and we hope to see you there!

If you would like to support 24 Carrot Gardens into the future, become a Regular Donor today.

 *David Walsh, Husband of Kirsha Kaechele; Owner/Founder of MONA.

Words by Sarah Proud, Material Institute CEO

Glenorchy Primary School student cooking up a storm at MONA 2017

Fun faces from Clarenden Vale Primary School in 2018

Garden ready to go at Tribaunna District School in 2018

Student in the garden at Warrane Primary School 2018

Students in Springfield Gardens Primary School

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...

Spring Fever is here!