Glenfield, NSW

As part of a NSW Government project to update the on-site farm at Hurlstone Agricultural College, we were commissioned to install eighteen large wicking beds for educational use. For a school built around agriculture, the brief was a serious one — a proper, hard-working growing facility rather than a token patch — and at eighteen beds it's one of the largest school installs we've done.

Together the beds provide a massive 82 square metres of sub-irrigated growing area. Once our nutritious wicking mix settles in, that's enough to produce a phenomenal volume of produce across the seasons — the kind of scale where students aren't just learning the theory but running something close to a working market garden.

Each bed is built from kiln-dried, vegetable-grade timber with our food-safe iron-oxide finish — no cheap CCA pine near where the students grow their food — fully lined over an integrated wicking reservoir and filled with our custom-blended organic growing medium. The sub-irrigation is what makes a facility this size practical to run: water sits in a reservoir in the base and the plants draw it up as they need it, so the beds only need topping up every few weeks rather than every day.

That matters enormously for a teaching farm. A facility like this has to keep producing through term breaks and the hot Western Sydney summers, when daily watering simply isn't going to happen — and that's exactly what a large run of self-watering raised beds delivers. School holidays won't present many issues to the vegetables in progress, because the reservoirs carry them through. It means the students' work isn't lost over the breaks, and the farm keeps ticking along year-round.

For a school like Hurlstone, the result is a genuine, hands-on growing facility at real scale — somewhere students can learn planting, crop rotation, nutrition and harvest across eighteen productive beds, not a single demonstration plot. We look forward to seeing them brimming with vegetables once the final landscaping is finished.

Built from durable, food-safe timber, these raised garden beds are made to last in a working farm setting. UrbanVeg builds raised garden beds and self-watering vegetable beds for schools across the Glenfield area and Western Sydney. If your school or college is planning a productive growing facility at any scale, we'd love to help you plan it.