Melbourne’s Most Amazing School Garden?! FULL Urban Farm Tour | Athol Road Primary School

Come explore one of Australia’s most impressive school gardens — the incredible urban farm at Athol Road Primary School in Springvale South, Melbourne.

🌱 With 66 FoodCube veggie beds, fruit trees, an aquaponics setup, and animals including llamas, ducks, chickens, and rabbits, this school is growing more than just food — it’s growing future farmers!

In this full spring garden tour, Environmental Education teacher Bryan Hunter walks us through what’s growing in October, how the program works, and how the school is teaching kids to become self-sufficient, sustainable, and connected to nature.

Whether you’re a teacher, parent, gardener or looking for school garden inspiration, this is one tour you don’t want to miss.

This video is perfect for anyone interested in edible gardening in schools, urban farming in Australia, or creating a productive garden in limited space. It’s a great example of how schools can integrate sustainability, hands-on learning, and environmental education into everyday life. If you’re planning a school garden, starting a veggie patch, or just dreaming of a food forest — this inspiring tour will give you plenty of ideas.

Topics covered:
– school garden ideas in Australia
– how to grow food at school urban farm
– FoodCube veggie gardening
– educational gardening programs
– spring garden tour in Australia
– self-sufficiency for kids
– aquaponics in the school system
– garden-based learning

Want to know more about the FoodCube wicking beds? Click here – https://foodcube.com.au/CHRISTIECOOPER

Do you find videos like this helpful? You can show your support by shouting me a packet of seeds to help me continue this little passion project! https://paypal.me/GreenThumbedReporter

Want me to email you when my next garden tour is uploaded? Drop your details here: https://forms.gle/woCyr67sNSPQXwhk7

Videos I mentioned:
HOW TO GROW TOMATOES (With Bryan Hunter) – https://youtu.be/2AdnSxpjqQk?si=JkZZbMJuKtQb5_jk
SKYFARM TOUR – https://youtu.be/8YJlNZX2BZk?si=m-wOS5px0V_dsHvt

OTHER PRODUCTS I LOVE
Merry People Gumboots: https://merry-people-au.pxf.io/jrbP0a
My favourite gardening tools on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4dY6HMe
I can earn commissions from some of the links above.

SOCIALS
Instagram: @ChristieCooper
TikTok: @GreenThumbedReporter

Watching this in a different month to what’s in the title of this video? You’ll find the right month to match your current growing conditions in my Garden Tours playlist – find it using the playlists tabs or with this link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMquA33zhZc&list=PLdQXFPmBiCeEx_bAyFdf-egJj8ZN3dsxy

#UrbanFarm #SchoolFarm #SchoolGarden #PrimarySchool #homesteading #HomesteadDreams #Homestead #selfsufficient #GardenTour #GardeningAustralia #aquaponics #FoodCubes

MUSIC
Angels by my side
Royalty Free Music: Bensound.com
License code: JFNIB1DBXDZJNUFJ

Hearty
Music by Bensound.com/royalty-free-music
License code: FYBSRV4GJBMU6SPU

Tenderness
Music by: Bensound
License code: CEITKCEMTBX5JPMS

we’re at Apple Road primary school today where they have the most amazing Urban Farm not only are they growing a crazy amount of edible produce there’s also bees there’s animals I’ve seen chickens I’ve seen Ducks I’ve seen llamas and I can’t wait to show you the whole thing and introduce you to Brian who’s hiding behind me who has done all of this by himself obviously with support of all the children and the school community Brian yes how you going oh you know busy busy it’s school holidays yeah oh is it I don’t know you’re here every day though pretty much yes yeah if it’s not the garden it’s the animal so um they all need to be cared for throughout the 2 we break luckily I live close by so this is really your life this gu it is yeah um once I had the opportunity to start it in 2012 um it’s just been a passion of mine for the last 12 years to be able to bring this to the school and offer it to all our students I run full garden tours here in Melbourne every couple of weeks if you like that sort of stuff subscribe now Brian where did the idea for this Garden come from uh well 12 years ago my previous princi wanted to start an environmental education program at the school that runs alongside uh PE music art those sort of things so I took it on and she said I’ll give you a blank check but I want it to be something that’s never been done before in a primary school so the Garden was probably the first thing we wanted to get up and running so she put the money where her mouth is and that’s why we have what we have today what is it that makes you so passionate about this uh I guess I just grew up as a kid surrounded by this environment like growing our own food having chickens and ducks and all the animals to sort of socialize with so I wanted to be able to bring that into the school environment where a lot of these kids don’t have that exposure anymore you know it’s it’s an iPad in front of their face these days so to be able to have this hands- on EXP experience I wanted to bring that to the to the school and I think I’m doing an all right job with it so I think it’s all right what um sort of beds have you got here uh well originally 12 years ago we started off with just the corrugated metal ring raised beeds and traditional beeds but over the years we’ve now changed to these uh water saving biofilter food cubes which are wicking beds um and they’ve probably cut our water bill by about 80% so we’ve got a whole lot of veggies here what’s growing at the moment so we’re still just finishing off our winter crops we’ve still got some cauliflowers that are ready to harvest coming out um so they’re the last of our brascas broccoli and uh cabbage have already come out uh we have carrots all year round so this is the next bed we’ll start harvesting from we’re just finishing off in this bed we’ve got another bed over there a lot of our animals on site eat carrot so we thought we’ll make sense to grow them even though they are cheap enough to buy any ready to pull out um uh probably this bed would be a better one to pull from but I reckon we might get oh beautiful nice chunky carrot there gorgeous so the kids do enjoy coming in and pulling carrots out ones that are ready and which ones aren’t so but to be able to taste a fresh carrot pulled out of the ground after you’ve washed it they’re they’re actually quite intrigued that they taste different um so but yeah we just had snow peas we’ve just pulled out so we’ve got the last of our silver beaten here this will probably become our summer crop beards we’ll we’ll recycle all this material compost it all down recharge the Beards ready for whether it’s zucchinis tomatoes cucumbers whatever it may be these look like some volunteer Tomatoes yeah we’ even got a few self seeders in there from last oh I can see flower buds on that one I know yeah so wacky weather we have goodness me yeah our biof filter originally had the food wall design over here which are wicking beards as well uh we utilize a lot of them through the garden um a lot of the smaller stuff we grow in there from herbs to strawberries do really well in there we do have some silver beaten uh rainbow chard growing in those ones end of winter and you’ve already got little strawberries yeah they’re they’re alpine strawberries those ones so they’re pretty much fruit all year round even through winter I guess that’s where the Alpine name comes from the kids it’s great for them to come in and pick a red strawberry and get in amongst the garden got broad beans that are almost ready for for Harvest on some of our plants now but we uh do a crimson flour and a white flow Variety in here and pretty much any broadbean you see growing in this Garden was planted by a four-year-old so tell me about that well we have on-site Kinder at our school as well so I see the the four-year-old Kinder groups we have two of those every Monday and they are probably my primary seed Planters so um broad beans is quite an easy one to do and they get to see the joy of their little seed growing into something so big um so so moral of the story if someone thinks they can’t grow from seed if kindergarteners can do it anyone can do it four-year-old can do it anyone can do it um other things we’ve just started new plantings lettuce beans beetro uh we have asparagus in this bed you can see the new spears popping up so Shing purple variety here right here and then we’ve got the green varieties over here this look so funny when they’re growing don’t they yeah see this is probably a bit past its due now it’s um going to go to flour soon so youve got you’ve got tomato volunteers yeah and I want to I want to feed this bed I want to layer it up for the as um for the asparagus but with all these Tomatoes I either have to remove them or bury them one of the two I can see cages over your yeah so this is just our little way to stop the birds getting there and digging up our seedlings so they’re probably ready to come off now just when they’re very small seedlings the birds getting amongst the the compost we add into the theed birs and they end up digging up all the the seedlings as well we’re chemical free here so we have to Mid defeat sometimes when it comes to slugs and snails I think that’s going to make everyone feel better yeah there there’s things you can do uh We’ve Tri many things as um a school group as well coffee grounds around each seedling works really well copper tape around the beeds can do it as well you can have sacrificial plants amongst it as well so hopefully that they go for those ones instead of the others so trial and error of a few different things you’ve got lots of beautiful flowers in your garden are they pollination attractors is that what’s going on here yeah pretty much uh we we have our own we have two beehives on site at the school as well so we want to make sure there’s plenty of uh pollen and nectar available for them they help us out by pollinating the things we need pollinated and uh we provide what they need in return so I want to see your beehive they’re pretty dos Sal at this time of the year so um we’ve had a few Queens in the past that have uh produced some genetics that have been quite angry so uh got some nice dool Queens at the moment so we can get a bit closer than usual we call this our veggie Highway we got 60 16 of the food cubes all joined into one big row so you can literally put the hose in one end and it Waters the whole thing so we got celery coming up at the moment uh this one’s just been recharged so let me get a quick zoom in of the celery this one’s recharged ready to go but we’ve got some pot potatoes in the next two cubes just start some potatoes in the ground yeah so they’re coming along nicely uh We’ve also done another variety of potato that’s just started popping out of the ground now so they were planted about 2 weeks after the other batches what after these ones yeah yeah we planted them and then got this bed ready and put some others in so that’s only two weeks more growth oh these have been in for about a week and a half two weeks now we planted them just before the end of school t so two we holiday we can see them popping up and they were done probably 3 to 4 weeks ago so the beds over the back here the Overflow usually sits about this high but we’ve actually raised it up to turn them into swamps we’re actually growing rice in here we’ve got our rice seedlings in the greenhouse I did not know you could grow rice in Melbourne well I didn’t know that 2 years ago until I actually sourced some rice from Queensland for a very exorbitant price and we gave it a go and few things worked out well some didn’t so this is our second second try growing rice so this is probably one of the only things that that your soil needs to be really drenched yeah uh water chestnut is another one that’ll be swampy so the water chestnuts are coming up now all these green spikes cool and after I’ve done these two the next one I’ll be trying is wasabi so they’re growing with saie at the Melbourne Sky Farm yes uh done an amazing job there so I’ve done a tour of that if anyone wants to see it a little bit of cross promotion here I’ll put a link in the description do not watch it until You’ finished seeing everything that’s growing here so that is not as interesting as that because I’ve read about these you’re growing bananas yes they’re looking a bit wind damaged at the moment but uh We’ve successfully grown quite a few bunches off these basically once we get a bunch off one of these stems we cut down the stem we probably got a few too many banana trees in there but um we’ll just let them go and see how they produce we keep the food up to them um banana trees need lots of water so food cubes are perfect for them you just keep the water in the reservoir and they’re happy all through summer so could I grab bananas in my backyard yep sure can get a winter variety these are only very small little finger bananas but bananas are banana so they taste good yeah they’re very sweet we’ve got onions in the last two birds they’re still not boing up very much yet so they’ll take a little while yet so and your Greenhouse is where you’ve got all your seedlings growing yeah so had all the students plant out the seeds at the end of last term so everything’s labeled everything’s coming up some things are almost ready to come out to be hardened up like your Tomatoes we’ve just filmed a video all about growing tomatoes so if you want to become an expert uh check out the link in the description after you’ve finished watching this so I can see Tomatoes okra okra yeah red and green tomatoes what’s down here we we got J we’ve got lettuce we’ve got mustard more Tomatoes we got cucumbers and zucchinis big leaves up the back the chili still hasn’t pop down up the back but then on the top shelf there longer don’t they you can see our rice seedlings so this is our white rice growing in this tray and our black rice which hasn’t been as successful but still pushed out a few plants so they’ll be going seedling trays yeah yeah they’re great where are they from cell trays um you can buy Bunnings I believe um students here also do things like taking cuting and everything else so we’ve got mury cuting that are coming on um we’ll we’ll pot them out eventually strawberries ready to go beautiful and once you’re growing strawberries once you never really need to buy them again do you that’s right yeah because they push off the runners every season so you can take a runner and make it into a new plant very easy M all right what’s through here uh so this is our campfire area but we have a lot of fruit trees lot of our Citrus through here we’ve got lemons oranges mandarins we got limes um both varieties and then we’ve got all our pear trees that run this circle here oh this is so cool so the kids also learn how to take cuting graft asalia they do it all um we had some successful graphs last year we’ve got one um nashy pear tree here and grafting nashy pear onto all these other varieties they’ve putting on their blossoms now so the flowers turn into the fruit I’ve never grown these before yeah so we’ll get a good good crop but the problem is cuz they’re so big they’re really hard to net so the birds usually win in this sense back when we started back in 2012 this was actually our chicken and duck area so we had chickens and ducks in the we didn’t have the fruit trees this was fenced all the way around um but when I show you our farm everything moved up to the farm so now we’re turning into Fruit orer we’ve got apricots we’ve got cherries you can even see the cherries forming up the back there already green [Music] cherries you know I don’t think I’ve ever seen cherries growing before so you can grow so many different types of fruit and Melbourne yes apricots go ballistic as well but we gave them a hard prune so there’s probably not too many apricots forming there’s a couple but we know we lose a lot of the crop by giving it a hard prune so we have to try and keep it manageable we’ve got a poly tunnel in here as well um so we’re able to grow different things throughout winter we’ve got some capens that are still in there they’ve all been pruned back hopefully they’ll kick off again going into uh the warmer months but we’ll we’ll uh probably put a lot of our tomatoes and capsacin in here as well over summer and they with extra heat they really get quite large in here they don’t get too hot on like uh they can we do have a shade cover that goes over the top for summer as well another thing we’ve got is our aquaponics am I allowed to say hello to our wonderful volunteer oh Judith is a as our Pocket Rocket volunteer so Judith volunteers her time um usually once a week and comes in and does some amazing work so it’s school holidays and she’s still here and can see strawberries so more of our food walls they’re coming on now they’re flowering up there’s even fruit on a lot of varieties got two different varieties in here we’ve got our melas in this section and then we’ve got the adenas up that section and they are actually donated to the school from um the owner of Garden World James wall thanks Jam um he wanted to see how the two different varieties grew he wanted feedback which ones fruited first and which ones produced more and blah blah blah so I was willing to do that for um some free strawberry plant they look similar though very similar but um they do fruit at different times and they have a different different taste in the strawberries or according to the kids anyway so what’s this that’s a fig tree just a self-seeded fig tree really yep we’ve got plenty of them around the garden it seems that the birds like to sit on the fence and drop the fig fig seeds from their droppings we got sugarcane growing next to you here as well kids love that harvesting the sugar cane and then uh chopping P it up for them to chew on they’re going to have a sweet treat it’s probably the best way to do it isn’t it that’s it natural sugar we got dwarf peaches in amongst there as well we got a personman tree behind you we’ve got peaches over there we’ve got nearly everything I think so what did you say this is uh aquaponic so aquaponics uh fish pond unfortunately we don’t have fish at the moment I think um the frost got them so but the idea is the fish obviously do their poo in the water all those nutrients that are in their poo gets pumped up to these gravel beds here and the plants will remove those nutrients from the water to help them grow and then the water cycles back and the clean water goes back into the pond so they help each other we’re actually going to do some of our rice planting in here as well and Wasabi in here you’ve got a few good ideas don’t you well like I said every year I want to try and introduce something new keep it fresh and real and so this side of the garden’s trying to become more of a indigenous Garden lots of berries up the back and currents as well we got our kiwi Vines up here that are just about to pop into flour goodness me one thing we learned about kiwi flowers is they need to be pollinated 40 times what in order to produce the fruit 40 times 40 times luckily we got bees on site which uh make that happen so we get a pretty good crop of uh kiwis each year we’ve got our male and female kiwi Vine you need to have a male and a female and then you have to wait between four and 7 years before you’ll actually get any fruit this space is Out of Bounds at recess and lunch so we don’t have kids just roaming around unsupervised during that time um but when we do have classes we’re learning about the right and wrong and the best way to do things so what are we walking past here uh these are apples all been asay by students so the students learn how to espay the branches onto the wise they prune them all back and get them all ready for the next season wish my kids could go here we do love our school this is this is very cool but it’ be great if all schools sort of had something similar in a way and these are our beeh high over the back so entrances on the other side as they come in and out of there these bees are a bit more docile than previous bees now I’ve got a baby on me so I’m handing the phone to Brian who’s going to get to she’s snoring you can probably hear that Brian for context can you get a shot of me sure cuz I want to show people if they can she’s snoring right into the microphone so I’m sorry if you’ve been wondering what that noise is I’m going to move the microphone now you can get back to the be all right thank you you’re collecting the honey you have to get all kit it up yeah we’ve got the suit and everything else but we actually use a beekeeper now to come in and do all that and service the hives and harvest everything for us we harvested in February and April this year so we got a good good harvest I think about 40 to 50 kilos and did I read somewhere that you sold them all and they sold out within a few minutes yeah yeah so we jar it all up and our parent Community they literally fight over it all that money goes right back into this program so it is almost self- sustaining for what we have on site whether it’s the produce whether it’s the honey whether it’s the chicken and duck eggs everything goes back to the parent community and I recognize these as being edible too M borage yeah are you excited about compost or don’t want to see our compost I used to not be excited about compost and now I love it well around the back is our comp Poss got alond trees here as well what are these before nectarine nectarine are they yeah cool and then we got almonds over the back here goodness me I don’t even know what an alond tree looks like yeah you do I do almonds when are they ready uh they’ll be ready over summer time yeah once they start splitting out of their um fish uh cover to expose the shell inside side and this is behind the scenes out the back it’s not the prettiest place to come but um this is where we make the magic so so this morning we had a whole Ray of um branches and stuff you can see we’ve got a commercial grade uh Moler in the shed there so we line that up here everything’s get shot into the first bed and then after 2 weeks it gets moved into the next bed so these beds are constantly rotating so stuff in this bed’s probably 6 weeks and it should be pretty much ready to go into the garden that’s what you’re left with after 6 weeks of mulching down a branch full of worms Black Gold yeah and that goes along with all our manures we’ve got alpackers chickens and Ducks all the man come out of the paddocks there along with that the dirty hay and everything else all right show me the chickens and the Ducks and the alpacas I think I can unlock this gate come on there we go think it was about 2019 my principal again um we’re at an award ceremony for another school that won this award which was uh Cornish College in bang home is this un friendly it can be um and they were showcasing that they had alpacas at their school and all that so my principal actually turned to me and using the FW said I want alpacas at our school we have rabbits and guinea pigs in the paddock divider as well we got two male alpacas here they’re young males um they’re also good at keeping the foxes away two young ducks in that shed there that we incubated out and we’ll do a a load of chickens this ter as well so so they’re hatching chickens too yeah why not Goodness Me yep there we go there’s one ducks like to hide their eggs so there’s another two beautiful we’ll sell them off $6 a dozen once we get back to school on Monday who needs a supermarket huh well that’s what it’s all about it’s showing that you can do it for yourself if you if you know how to do it so we’re in one of the classrooms now so this is my environmental Ed classroom where all the students come once a week for 45 minutes who have we got here this is George she’s our blue and yellow MC hi George uh this is Redmond we’ve got long neck turtles we’ve got Guppies who needs a trip to the zoo this is um chipper Lucy’s woken up just for the um just for the good bit bu ran thinks that you might like to hold a snake and I said absolutely not oh that’s that’s no fun absolutely not snake is in here sleeps buddies up with the bearded dragon very friendly but people have that phobia about snakes so totally understandable all right if it’s not poisonous it’s not is it what about biting no how do you know um he’s fed on Friday so he’s all good okay I did it you did it I clearly trust you Brian oh look I wouldn’t put anything In Harm’s Way for anyone so what’s in there tree frogs oh that is so cute the kids are going to be so jealous I’m happy to do it coming on my holidays and keep it running cuz I think it’s valuable for the Next Generation to understand where their food comes from I I just love it I still do after 12 years I want to continue I want to keep building on it and uh trying something new all the time Brian’s also given us a crash course on everything you need to know about growing tomatoes that’s the next video you absolutely cannot miss