Thanks to The Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) Education Institute’s teaching and learning project, The Children’s Harvest, the RCH now has its very own veggie garden.

Over the past six months, RCH patients taking part in the project have designed garden beds, identified vegetables they would like to plant, developed a harvest schedule and created menus designed to minimise waste of their crop.

“The Children’s Harvest aims to educate and change the way children and young people approach and think about food,” said Emma Fraser, RCH Education Institute teacher and Coordinator of The Children’s Harvest. “The project introduces students to sustainable food production and healthy eating. At the same time, it empowers and engages students through active learning.”

The result of the project planning and petitioning by students is the vegetable crate gardens. The two crates were generously donated by The Little Veggie Patch Co and are now home to various veggies, looked after by patients on the Kelpie Ward. The Children’s Harvest has also received a donation from MasterChef Australia, which contributes to the maintenance of the vegetable crates and future projects.

The Children’s Harvest project is beneficial on a number of levels. “The project educates students about how plants grow and gives children a reason to go outside. It creates opportunities to work with kids from other wards and it’s something fun to do while in hospital,” Emma said. “It also takes individual interests into account; participants decided how they were going to be involved. Some wanted to create scarecrows, while others were interested in planting the veggies.”

This wonderful project allows patients at the RCH to not only plant, maintain and harvest the veggie gardens, but to also create meals from the produce grown right here at the hospital.