Close to $8000 has been poured in by a supermarket behemoth to support a Nelson Intermediate School horticultural project.
The Countdown Growing for Good granted a share of $50,000 to 10 Aotearoa schools to allow their winning ideas to address climate change and boost sustainability to flourish.
Nelson Intermediate STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and maths) team leader, Sarah Johns, says the idea was to install a series of tanks at the school to create a large catchment for gathering rainwater for its vegetable gardens, fruit trees and native trees.
She says she was “very excited” that the application was successful.
“We’ve put a lot of effort into planting and growing food and providing opportunities for that, and as we and our students are aware, seasons are quite extreme,” she says.
“In some of our seasons we get plenty of it [rain] and in other seasons we don’t have enough, so when it’s plentiful, it makes sense to harvest it and uphold water resistance to maintain our crops, our food, and keep the garden looking beautiful.
“We also don’t have access to water in all of the spaces around the school, so to be able to use surface areas from all our buildings and capture that water and use it is a sustainable practice to then feed and keep those things that we’ve invested in alive, provides us with greater water resilience.”
Sarah says with the $8000 grant, the school plans to install three tanks which can hold between 1000 and 3000 litres and connect them to existing plumbing and guttering systems.
“We would love to have them on site for the school holidays, that way we’ve got a season where we can harvest water before it gets hot and dry so the food and plants are well serviced.
“Ideally, because we would like to be as sustainable as possible, we would like to source them locally.”
The school also received a Countdown Growing for Good grant in 2022 for a project where students designed and distributed 250 beeswax pouches to welcome new entrants.
