Students at Helensburgh's Holy Cross Catholic Primary School taste, eat and take food they grow in the school garden home.
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On Thursday Metropolitan Colliery owner Peabody delivered fresh soil and fruit trees to the students to complement its annual $30,000 sponsorship of the school's gardening club and environmental program.
The garden project was started after a gumtree fell on the school's original, smaller vegetable patch a few years ago.
Led by school support officer and gardening club co-ordinator Sue Murray, Holy Cross' impressive horticultural setup now includes a vegetable garden known as 'The Patch', an orchard and their Yalunga Garden (a peaceful native garden space).
Ms Murray and ecologist Dr Rod Armistead have also recently started growing bush tucker plants in The Patch.
For the past five years Dr Armistead has also taught at the school one day a week thanks to Peabody funding.
"Rod and I are very passionate about our purpose within the school," Ms Murray said.
"We see ourselves in a 'consultative' type of role and encourage our students to make decisions on what they would like to do with the gardens. So they're constantly evolving based on decisions made by the gardening club members.
The children enjoy propagating native plants in particular, and they love harvesting and sampling the produce.
- Sue Murray
"We offer activities including planting seasonal seeds, preparing garden beds with compost and mulching, and collecting seed to be used the following season.
"The children enjoy propagating native plants in particular, and they love harvesting and sampling the produce.
"We are now in a position to be able to do this each week. When there is enough, the club members visit chosen classrooms to share the produce with other students, too."
The funding also allows Dr Armistead and Ms Murray to provide curriculum-based sessions to all classes in the school, each comprising both a discussion/theory element and a practical, hands-on component.
Jon Degotardi from the Metropolitan Colliery, said Peabody was proud to support programs that improved educational outcomes for local children in a fun, outdoor environment.
"Peabody's Metropolitan Colliery is committed to supporting the community that supports us," Mr Degotardi said.
"What better way to do that than by ensuring the kids at Holy Cross get to participate in great programs like this where they get outdoors, have fun and learn important messages about sustainable food production and the environment.
"Many of us who work at Metrop are parents, we're part of the Helensburgh community and we love to see the kids at Holy Cross and other schools get the educational opportunities they deserve."
Holy Cross Catholic Primary School principal Brendan Dickinson appreciated the funding support from Peabody.
"It's great to have an ecologist here at the school talking about environmental stewardship, looking after the environment and teaching kids about how we grow vegetables and where they really come from," he said.
"The [environment] project connects learning inside the classroom in the real world to outside the classroom.
"It gets kids off the screen and outside digging in the garden and being in the sun."
Mr Degotardi said the Metropolitan mine had provided about $210,000 to the environmental program at Holy Cross Primary School.
"The $30,000 a year that the Metropolitan mine provides to Holy Cross is a small investment in the future of these kids - so we think it's well worth it," he said.