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Stories

On any given day at Ravenswood Heights Primary School, something quietly transformative is underway. Young students are tending to vegetable gardens, tasting foods they have never tried before and learning the vocabulary of flavour and texture. They are discovering that food doesn’t just appear on a plate — it grows, changes with the seasons, is shared and connects people. For Ravenswood, a community facing daily pressures of unemployment, cost of living and limited access to fresh and affordable food, these moments matter. They are part of a long-view intentional effort to shift food culture through hands-on experience, repetition and care.

Stewarding this work is Bron Strange, Kitchen Specialist for the 24 Carrot Gardens program, who also works across the complementary School Food Matters (SFM) lunch program. Together, these two initiatives form a powerful and interconnected response to food insecurity in the community — one through meeting immediate nutritional needs and expanding tastes, the other through building practical skills, confidence and curiosity that underpin long-term food resilience.

Before joining 24 Carrot Gardens, Bron worked for 15 years as a professional chef in restaurant and cafe kitchens across the state. Stepping into a primary school was not an obvious next move, but piqued Bron’s interest when she heard about the role through a friend. ‘I’ll give it 12 months and see,’ Bron recalls thinking, ‘it was a whole new experience for me, and it was a little overwhelming at first, but then I just fell in love with it. I fell in love with the role and what the program is trying to achieve.’

Two years on, what keeps Bron here is not just the food, but what happens around it: ‘The kitchen garden teaches team work, and helps students develop flexibility and resilience. Sometimes the weather isn’t our friend and we have to change plans, sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t. In the garden and kitchen kids feel like they can achieve things in a relatively short space of time, and I enjoy seeing the way this activates their self esteem and confidence.’

Over time, the program has intentionally broadened students’ outlook through food and conversation, introducing recipes from different cultures and linking ingredients and tastes to stories and meaning. Students are also learning new ways to talk about food, moving beyond ‘urgh, disgusting!’ to build vocabulary around taste, texture and preference, which extends into positive participation in social food settings. Students now arrive at school excited about food, often approaching Bron in the playground or hallway to update her about their home cooking adventures, or ask what’s on the menu for lunch. Bron and the school leadership team reflect that it’s been a joy to see students embrace dishes like fresh gnocchi with tomato sauce and eggplant curry as favourites.

Deepening the connection between the garden and kitchen is ongoing, with Bron and Garden Specialist, Thanh Nguyen, working closely on crop planning for the year ahead so that even more of the produce that students grow themselves ends up in the recipes they cook and eat. As term one unfolds, the pair are focused on striking a balance between familiar fruits and vegetables alongside a few that are more adventurous — an approach grounded in safety, to build confidence while gently extending students’ culinary experiences. They are also getting creative with outdoor cooking methods, al fresco dining, and a student-led composting system where food scraps are returned to the garden through a playful Com-POST letterbox. This simple, daily action completes a visible cycle from plate to soil to plant, building students’ awareness of sustainability, care and interconnected systems.

The work of 24 Carrot Gardens unfolds slowly and relationally, sowing seeds that can take years to reveal their full impact beyond the garden and school gate. Bron, Thanh and the Ravenswood Heights school community recognise this long view and hold it with care and consistency, while also celebrating the signs of positive change already taking root: ‘Sometimes cultural change takes time and effort. You need to take the long view. Those little pieces of learning you bring to your students every day add up over time. You might not see the difference straight away but it is happening quietly and steadily and when you see it, even in the small things, that needs to be recognised and celebrated.’

an overview of the 24 carrot gardens program in ravenswood heights primary school

Food Resilience Takes Root in Ravenswood

If you’ve wandered past our new garden lately, you’ve probably noticed something a little… wild! That’s right — our newly redeveloped garden has officially transformed into a thriving, leafy jungle paradise, and our students couldn’t be more excited.

Over the past few months, the incredible Tamas Oszvald and a team of dedicated staff from the 24 Carrot Gardens have worked tirelessly to bring the garden back to life. New garden beds, fresh soil, improved pathways, and a whole lot of teamwork have created a space bursting with colour, life, and delicious possibilities.

One standout feature is our beautiful new gate, adorned with stunning pottery pieces created by students late last year. Although the gate isn’t accessible just yet (there are still a few finishing touches happening this term), it will soon become a welcoming entrance for students and families stepping into this magical space.

And it’s not just the students loving the makeover — the plants are thriving too! Everything is growing faster, greener, and bigger than ever before. Some of our plants are almost as tall as the Grade 3s!

Each week, classes visit the garden to explore, learn, and help care for the space. It’s quickly becoming one of the most anticipated activities of the school week. Students have been proudly watering, weeding, planting, and even chatting to the plants (and while we’re not saying it’s magic… the plants do seem to be listening!).

One of the highlights of every lesson is harvesting time. Our veggie beds are absolutely booming — a hedge of basil, rainbow chard leaves wider than your hands, and carrots that rarely reach full size thanks to curious little hands and hungry little mouths! Students have been thrilled to uncover golden nugget pumpkins, yellow zucchinis, beans, chillies, capsicums, beetroots, and even the odd (and extremely precious!) watermelon. Every harvest feels like a tiny adventure.

Not only are students learning how food grows, but they’re also building confidence, teamwork skills, and a sense of pride in something they’ve helped create. For many, the garden has become a peaceful, happy place to dig, explore, and connect with nature — a refreshing break from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

We’re also thrilled that our fresh produce is making its way into kitchen classes. From crunchy salads to zucchini muffins, students are discovering that home‑grown food doesn’t just taste good — it tastes amazing when you’ve grown it yourself.

Alongside our incredible new garden, we’re very excited to welcome our amazing Garden Specialist, Jess Fodor! Jess joins Kitchen Specialist superstar Kelly Clark and Lead Teacher Indianna Massey, and we are absolutely buzzing with excitement for the year ahead.

Our garden is still expanding, still thriving, and always welcoming helping hands. Families are invited to pop in, ask questions, or even volunteer if they’d like to get involved. Together, we’re growing more than just vegetables — we’re growing confidence, community, and a whole lot of joy.

We cannot thank the incredible Tamas and the team at the 24 Carrot Gardens enough for creating such a special space for our school community!!

So next time you walk past, take a peek. You might just hear the gentle whisper of leaves saying, “Welcome to our jungle!”

Words by Indianna Massey, 24CG Lead Teacher at Herdsmans Cove Primary

Lead teacher talked about the new kitchen garden upgraded by 24 Carrot Gardens in their school.

Our New Jungle of Joy!

“We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it’s never a question of ‘critical mass’. It’s always about critical connections.”

The story of Material Institute is a living web, patterned through experimentation and collective sense-making. Over the last four and a half years, we’ve grown from the foundations of 24 Carrot Gardens into a broader platform for food education, creative practice and systems change.

As our team and contributions have expanded, so too has the need for a shared understanding of our charitable purpose and emergent strategy.

Inspired by the thinking of adrienne maree brown, we’ve learned to pay attention to the small relational patterns that shape systems. What we attend to grows — so we orient our work toward connection, curiosity and collective learning.

We also acknowledge that safety is not the absence of threat, but the presence of connection. For us, this becomes a design principle: how we hold meetings, how feedback circulates across teams, and how decisions are shared rather than centralised.

As tangible examples, this is embodied at regular whole-team gatherings, which begin with a practice of reflection through journaling and small-group check-ins. And for the pragmatists curious about what this looks like in daily operations, we use software platforms such as Slack and Monday.com to communicate, track projects and plan together — providing visibility across both individual and collaborative contributions.

Over time, these practices raised a practical question for us as an organisation: how do we hold shared direction while remaining responsive to emergence?

To harness the energy of our growing team and the new responsibilities that come with growth, in October 2024, we cast off on an 18-month learning voyage to articulate our Theory of Change (ToC).

Facilitated by our strategic design and learning partners at 

 — Kim Shore and Dave Kaldor — the process was also guided by community partners 

 — Raylene Foster and Chloe Woolnough — and Creative Strategist 

The process invited us to ask difficult questions: What change are we actually seeking? How do gardens, food education and creative practice contribute to systemic transformation? And how do we measure impact in ways that honour complexity rather than solve it?

Throughout 2025, the ToC — as our “compass” — helped guide the pace, flow and direction of our work. When new opportunities arose, we tested them against our ToC for alignment with purpose. When challenges emerged in project delivery, we checked our compass to ensure we were still on track, and that the difficulty was not a signal of mission drift.

Towards the end of last year, we reflected together on what we had learned and turned our attention to articulating and integrating guiding principles to underpin the ToC, alongside a general simplification of the language.

For us, our principles are the ethos shaping our practice — the commitments that orient how we live, learn, collaborate and adapt together. They ground our work in stewardship, creativity, community wisdom, storytelling and shared responsibility for the living systems we’re part of.

In 2026, we’re testing the second iteration of the ToC, ensuring it remains a living document. Outcomes are held lightly, honouring the complex and entangled social and ecological systems we exist within. In this sense, our ToC reflects our current understanding, providing a foundation for ongoing exploration, social impact measurement, learning and iteration as the system itself evolves.

This phase of defining our Emergent Practice is not so much about creating something new as developing a shared understanding of what already exists — and of what we want to grow at MI.

Over the coming months, we will continue sharing reflections on this journey through 

 as a series of stories and insights — not only what can be named or measured, but also what is felt and sensed, glimpsed through the cracks.

In the next seasonal edition, we will share our Theory of Change in full. For now, we’re delighted to introduce our Principles — an integral thread in the living web of MI, and our small contribution to the web of connections from which meaningful change so often grows.

If you would like to hear more of these longer form thoughts from us,  

FROM VISION TO EMERGENT PRACTICE

National Science Week is Australia’s major national celebration of the sciences each year in August.

This year Material Institute and 24 Carrot Gardens hosted a Science Week extravaganza over 4 days at Material Institute, out in Bridgewater.

The learning was great and it was wrapped up beautifully in the different activities. Surrounding the kids with so many passionate, respectful, understanding adults was gold.

We invited our four 24 Carrot Garden high schools – Bayview Secondary College, Jordan River Learning Federation Senior School, Kingston High School, and Montrose Bay High School – to participate in eight workshop offerings with themes of ecology, innovation, sustainability, waste minimisation, regeneration and circular thinking. Up to 50 students visited each day, and the interactive, hands-on workshops were delivered by staff and industry leaders in their fields.

It was fantastic to see students who do not usually readily engage with learning participate with such enthusiasm. The highly practical nature of the activities was a key contributor to this.

— Assistant Principal, Jordan River Senior School

Workshop activities included some talented folk facilitating cultural burning, natural dyeing, making biochar, bokashi compost making. With healthy cooking from the garden and ice-cream making using dry ice with Chef Vlad, seed saving and propagation with our horticulture team, ceramics with our art team, and making a Beeluxe Body Bar in our Beauty Lab with Bodie. We also had an epic music lineup, with a special act playing each day including Atomic Deluxe, Rose Turtle Ertler and Tiff Norchick.

In here [clay studio] I feel good. It is relaxing and I have freedom to think of new things to make which is pretty cool. Natural products make me want to use it more.

Science was interwoven with art throughout the week, and a communal long-table lunch was shared. It was an enriching four days, and the feedback from the participating schools has been heart-warming!

The majority of students enjoyed their day thoroughly, with some still talking about it a couple of weeks later.

We would love to thank our 24 Carrot Garden team member Andy Rushton for his mighty effort in bringing this all together as well as all the team members working hard behind the scenes, and the following businesses and people for sharing their knowledge and skills with us all.

Palawa man and traditional fire practitioner Jason Andrew-Smith

Christina Guidici / The New Black Biochar

Jimmy Corrigan / The Regenerative Gardener

National Science Week

At this year’s 24 Carrot Carnival in November, Year 3 and 4 students will celebrate the incredible resources our planet provides, and ways we can use them wisely.

Our Carnival will consolidate learnings from Material Institute workshops, kitchen garden sessions at school sites, and classroom learning throughout the year. Through immersive performances and activities, we will explore waste minimisation, regeneration, and circular thinking — learning from nature’s own cycles. From reducing rubbish and cleaning up our spaces, to using and re-using materials creatively, we will discover how small actions can make a big impact.

For our Carnival poster design, we extended an invitation to Year 3 and 4 students to design an eye-catching poster for this year’s Carnival, exploring our theme of MAGIC MATERIALS.

Nature’s cycles (seasons, the water cycle, plant photosynthesis)

Healthy soils and helpful critters (worms, microbes, pollinators)

Compost (transforming food scraps and garden waste back into nutritious soil)

Embracing wonky fruit and veg (using all parts, pickling, preserving)

Zero waste (how can we produce less rubbish?)

Despite only being able to choose one entry for our final poster, we received so many amazing entries, and we just had to share some of our favorites and the final poster selection.

A big congratulations to Mia C from Brighton Primary School who took out the winning spot (as seen at the top) with votes from the 24 Carrot team!

We are thankful for everyone who went to the effort to create something and think about all the magic materials we have around us!

24CG Poster Comp

We’re celebrating the many uses of the humble broad bean - a spring hero that’s easy to grow, delicious to eat, and full of surprises. While its reputation has long suffered thanks to memories of mushy, over-boiled beans, our 24 Carrot Gardens schools know better. To help us show just how versatile and wonderful this plant can be, we visited our friends at The Agrarian Kitchen, one of Australia’s top restaurants, to chat with founder Rodney Dunn and head gardener Mitch Thiessen.

Each spring, our 24 Carrot schools are busily picking, podding, cooking and devouring broad beans. It’s not uncommon to hear a groan of “Yuck, broad beans!”, unfortunately this is usually from adults! But once you see how Rodney and Mitch use them, it’s impossible not to fall in love with this plant all over again.

Rodney’s passion is infectious. “It’s such a great plant for our climate, and the beauty of it is that the whole plant can be used,” he says. From leaf to flower to bean, everything (except the roots) is edible - and delicious. “We take out the growing tips and use them raw in salads or grilled over a really hot fire,” he explains. “When the beans are young, as big as your pinky finger, we cook them whole over a nice hot fire for a bit of smokeyness - not too much, the fire equivalent of a blanch. Larger than that, we pod them once, and then pod them twice.”

Even the side leaves have a place on the plate. “They still get used in salads,” says Rodney. “A lot of people never think to use the leaves.” And of course, the flowers? Yes they are edible too, but “We prefer the flowers to turn into beans,” he laughs.

Out in the Agrarian Kitchen’s one-acre market garden, Mitch explains how broad beans aren’t just a kitchen star - they’re a soil champion too. “Plants are the best soil builders,” he says. “Whether we’re using broad beans as a crop or a green manure, they’ll always be one of the additions.”

Before leading the Agrarian Kitchen’s garden, Mitch was a Kitchen and Garden Specialist with 24 Carrot Gardens - so he knows first-hand the joy and excitement broad beans bring to students. “If you put a plate of food down with lots of green things, kids might not be interested,” he says. “But when they’re in the garden, they pick it, smell it, and taste it - they’re so much more open to trying things. Being part of that process makes all the difference.”

That hands-on connection is exactly what 24 Carrot Gardens is all about — joy, wonder and delicious learning. Across our schools, broad beans spark curiosity and confidence as students discover how good fresh food can taste straight from the garden. The simple act of planting, picking and cooking these beans connects students to the food they eat and intrinsically to the value of healthy, local, sustainable eating.

Rodney took us into the kitchen to show us some of the more sophisticated places their broad beans end up. “Shoyu is a Japanese word for a soy sauce, but it’s a better word then ‘soy sauce’ because you can then say it’s a ‘broad bean shoyu’.” he says. “As our culinary landscape has expanded, and we deepen our understanding of other cultures we start to adopt their words in our kitchen.” He gives us a taste of this aging shoyu and it already has a complex flavor.

They not only have their broad bean ‘soy sauce’ but also a broad bean ‘miso’! “Quite often we will use dried broad beans to make an amino paste or a miso, typically miso is soybean based but we are using broad beans to create a deep umami flavoured puree which can be used in a number of ways.” Rodney explains. “It’s quite nice smeared on a carrot, radish or kohlrabi from the garden as a canapé or snack. It’s quite nice adding a spoon to a sauce. It’s lovely, as miso is, made into a soup!” We had a taste of this fermenting paste and it tasted like it would go perfectly on toast!

So next time you see broad beans popping up in the garden, think beyond the pod and enjoy the whole plant! Leaves can be eaten raw in salads, tips are delicious raw or cooked, baby beans can be enjoyed whole, and larger beans are double-shelled to remove any bitterness. It’s one of many plants that’s helping our students grow healthy minds, healthy bodies, and a lifelong love of good food.

Sow seeds directly from April to September, avoiding sowing in the depth of winter (June-July).

Space plants 30-40 cm apart and rows 50-60 cm apart.

Make multiple sowings for an extended harvest.

Support plants as they start to grow tall - a few stakes and some twine does the trick!

Pinching out the growing tips (and eating them) helps to grow compact and productive plants.

Search for rare and colourful varieties like ‘Crimson Flowered’ or ‘Chocolate Flowered’.

For seed saving simply leave beans on the plant to dry out.

Food Resilience Takes Root in Ravenswood

Our New Jungle of Joy!

FROM VISION TO EMERGENT PRACTICE

National Science Week

24CG Poster Comp

The Humble Broad Bean