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Heath & Nutrition

Exercise

Central to our lives at The Farmhouse are health and nutrition. We therefore offer a fully integrated complementary indoor/outdoor program for children.

Children have plenty of time – and space – outdoors to run and jump, hop and skip, and enjoy the openness that only acres of freedom can provide – allowing children to flex their bodies enables them to stretch their minds.

Nutrition

Our onsite vegetable garden demonstrates a thorough appreciation for health and nutrition, quite literally, from the grass roots. As members of the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Program children learn to grow their own food, and then how to create tasty meals.

The nutritional aspect is particularly exciting as each room has it’s own mini-kitchen! Here the children enjoy taking the fresh produce they’ve just harvested from the garden to their own kitchen, and then together create a meal to enjoy.

STEPHANIE ALEXANDER KITCHEN GARDEN PROGRAM

The Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation provides the inspiration, information, professional development and support for educators to deliver pleasurable food education to children and young people in Australia.

Pleasurable food education is a fun, hands-on approach to teaching children and young people about fresh, seasonal, delicious food so they form positive food habits for life.

Delivered through our Kitchen-Garden program, pleasurable food education has an array of health, wellbeing, education and community benefits.

Stephanie Alexander AO, one of Australia’s most recognised cooks, food educators and authors, established the Kitchen Garden Foundation in 2004, following the success of the first kitchen garden program piloted in 2001. The motivation for this work came from Stephanie’s awareness of the growing childhood obesity problem in Australia.

The Farmhouse has whole-heartedly adopted the Kitchen-Garden Program across our entire service, with vegetable gardens, herb beds and fruit trees across all areas of the service. Whether your child is in childcare, kinder or outside school care, there’s a veggie garden for them to tend and a Kitchen-Garden program for them to be part of.

Children find the hands-on participation exciting and rewarding – and yes, they happily eat things like spinach and chick peas that they won’t eat for you at home!