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Managing a cold-climate garden at Numeralla PS

15-10-2010 Helen Litchfield is the Garden Specialist at Numeralla Public School in Southern NSW, which endures pretty extreme weather conditions. One thing that stands out when you visit the garden is a white wall that faces north. It's been designed and constructed to help them adapt to their climate - here's Helen's description of how they've achieved that.

Numeralla PS is located approximately 90 ks from the Snowy Mountains and therefore has all the challenges that come with cold-climate gardening. For the garden to produce food for our kitchen throughout the year we needed to ensure we had strategies in place at the early design stage.

To combat our very short growing season and the unpredictability of cold weather at any time of the year (we lost zucchinis, cucumber and squash to frost last year in the Christmas holidays!) we needed to have the security of a hothouse. This enables us to have our seedlings ready and quite advanced to plant out when weather and soil temperature allows. We also grow some produce during the winter months when the ground is too cold for plants to grow and produce.

Another strategy that has been great to extend our growing season is the construction of a north-facing wall. The way the wall works is that the big thermal mass created by dense building materials heats up and cools down more slowly than the surrounding air, evening out extreme differences in day and night temperatures. So the wall absorbs the warmth from the sun during the day and as it gets cooler the plants against the wall are kept warm and protected as retained warmth is radiated onto them.

We have found frost damage has been greatly reduced and plants are able to produce more for a longer period of time. The wall was built by two volunteers (one parent and one grand parent). The photo shows the form work that was used to build the homemade bricks. The finished wall is 1.8 m high and looks fantastic.

This just goes to show you can do anything with a school garden if you have enough imagination and some help from the community. Congratulations on some really innovative thinking Numeralla!

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