Pennant Hills, NSW

Pennant Hills High School came to us to transform its kitchen-garden area into a productive, hard-working space for student learning — and at twenty-two beds, it's one of the largest wicking bed gardens we've built.

We cleared and levelled a group of tired old beds first, then installed 22 new raised wicking beds across the area, each a generous 2.9 by 1.4 metres of growing space.

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. Each is fully lined over an integrated WaterUps wicking reservoir, so the beds self-water from below: topped up roughly monthly in winter and fortnightly in summer, they stay productive without daily watering.

For a busy school garden tended by many hands across the week, that low-maintenance, hard-to-overwater design is exactly what's needed.

Each of the twenty-two beds was fitted with its own in-bed worm composter, turning the school's food scraps into rich castings that feed the soil right where it's needed. It closes the loop beautifully — students drop in their scraps, the worms do the work, and the garden feeds itself.

Every bed also got a solar-powered ultrasonic pest controller, quietly helping keep possums and other visitors at bay without sprays or chemicals near the produce — a small, set-and-forget touch that protects a lot of young seedlings.

We staged the build across consecutive weekends, completing and filling each set of beds before starting the next so the school could begin planting straight away.

The result is a clean, scalable raised garden that brings real growing — and real composting — into everyday school life on Sydney's leafy Upper North Shore. If your school is planning a vegetable garden or edible-learning space, we'd love to help you plan it.