The Heart and Soil Community Gardens have come alive again!

One of the Musselburgh School whānau members who has helped the children bring the garden back to life, November 2023.

We met with the Heart and Soil Communty Garden group recently, and were so impressed with how beautiful and lush the garden is looking! Their name seems even more apt now - the community has provided so much heart to this project, while we were honoured to be able to provide the soil, along with some other supplies, as one of our first projects.

Children helping to prepare the garden boxes for lovely new dirt, August 2023.

The most visible part of this project started on a very cold and rainy day in August, when a huge pile of lovely, healthy new soil was delivered to the school. Some hardy community members braved the weather to help prepare the garden beds, and to hunt out all the ancient old potatoes! Once the weather had improved a bit, the school’s tamariki enjoyed getting all the dirt into the beds, ready for planting to begin.

Now that spring is well underway, it’s been amazing to see all this hard work come to fruition! In only three short months, the gardens have absolutely flourished under the care of many community members, and are now at the point where people have been able to start harvesting various veges and herbs.

We’re also really excited that there are great ideas for future methods to try and incorporate more learning for the tamariki in many ways from this bountiful project, such as cooking with ingredients from the garden, or creating sensory areas have all been raised: keep an eye out for further developments!

This lovely community garden is a joint project between Musselburgh Primary School and the Dunedin Multicultural Council and has had loads of input from the community through the school's tamariki, local whānau, Sue at the Dunedin Vegetable Growers Club, Jennie at Enviroschools Otago, Mitre 10 MEGA Dunedin, St Kilda Seed Library and Seedling Stall. not to mention us at Dream South D! If you’d like to find out more, email garden@dmec.org.nz or visit the DMCC Community Garden page.