Gunnedah, NSW

Two years after we installed their first seven broad wicking beds — six grouped in the primary school garden and one set apart elsewhere on the grounds — Gunnedah South Public School got back in touch. The garden was working, the classes had taken to it, and the school wanted far more room for students to get growing. When a customer comes back to expand a garden we built, it's the best kind of feedback — the first beds had earned their place, and now they wanted to build on what was already thriving.

Out in the hot, dry North West, the constant challenge for any school garden is water. Gunnedah summers are long and harsh, rain can be a long time coming, and there are stretches — especially over the school holidays — when there's simply no one on site to do the watering. An ordinary raised bed would dry out and lose a term's work in a fortnight. That's exactly the problem our wicking system is built to solve, and it's why these beds suit the region so well.

So we wrapped sixteen narrow wicking beds around the six original beds in the primary school area, all running the same sealed-reservoir, self-watering system as the first install. The narrow profile fits neatly into the space and is easy for younger students to reach right across, while the larger footprint gives many more classes room to plant at once. The new beds and the originals now read as one connected garden rather than two separate projects.

The way the wicking system works is what makes the bigger garden no harder to keep alive than the small one. Water sits in a sealed reservoir in the base of each bed, and the plants draw it up from below as they need it. The reservoirs carry the garden through the dry spells and the holiday breaks, so the vegetables keep growing even when no one is there to water them, and the garden doesn't die back between terms. For a school, that reliability is everything — it means the effort the children put in actually pays off.

Every bed is built from kiln-dried, vegetable-grade timber with our food-safe iron-oxide finish — no cheap CCA pine anywhere near where the students grow their food. These are raised garden beds made to take years of daily school use, weathering gracefully rather than rotting out, so the school's investment keeps working season after season.

Best of all, the garden has grown with the school's needs. Surrounding the six original beds with sixteen narrow ones gives Gunnedah South students far more space to learn about growing vegetables — more hands in the soil, more classes involved, more harvests to share. It's a productive, low-maintenance teaching resource that scaled up neatly when the school was ready for it, and a quiet sign that the first garden did its job.

Gunnedah South is a big rural K-6 school of around 550 students, with a large proportion of Aboriginal students, so a growing space this size gives a lot of children hands-on time in the soil. If your school is looking to start a productive garden — or grow one it already has — we'd love to help you plan it.

More of our school gardens: www.urbanveg.com.au/wicking-beds-for-schools