Labor's school garden policy is as well thought out as the Howard Turnbull water plan for the Murray Darling River basin, but there is less damage done if things aren't quite right.

School food gardens – could indeed be just another element in the all-pervading grab-bag of the standard quick fix. A cuddly imagined cloak over the emperor’s imagined clothing.

Who's getting these magic gardens, – those among the mulga landscapes of heat, flies, and no running water? For them, what a wondrous Xanadu – “draw a circle round them thrice, for they have drunk of paradise” – if they ever get ‘em.
Or those who will not be “hewers of wood and drawers of water” (determined by parential affluence) after the style of Malcom Fraser when defending, a generation ago, Federal Government funding for construction of a second swimming pool at an old school he had attended.

What guarantees are there of adequate maintenance, if ever they are established? Wherever they are, gardens need water. Especially the scientifically essential Australian National Botanic Gardens. Even it - especially it – is, and has been, starved under successive Governments both Coalition and Labor. Starved for funds and now, especially for water - with damned little relief in sight. After the statesmanlike inception of this iconic ANBG, political support for its bare necessities evaporated almost totally. Will school gardens fare any better?

But “gardens” are great – food or otherwise. Much better if ankle-biters can be persuaded to get all sweaty beggaring around in them. Away from continuous occupation of a seat facing/listening to a voodoo delivery from their happy electronic medium. Also without their mobile phone; deprived of ear-plug and canned music. It will take some doing, but maybe they can be persuaded to tune in to sunlight, shadows, clouds, trees, flies and heat, frost, bitter wind stirring the corpuscles. All such no longer excluded.

Recently Australia lost a great contributor to our understanding of this continent and our impact upon it. He had attributed the birth of passion for his work to a school, facilitated by a particular teacher.

Australia would be on a winner if its schools, as a general thing, set out to develop such passion in its youth. “Food gardens”? Instead, school gardens are food for thought.

School gardens were a fact of life in my early primary school years in a Queensland small country town in 1937. Indeed a picture of the Mundubbera Primary school garden was a feature on the front cover of 'Yates Gardening Guide'.

The food garden produce was appreciated in those depression days as a supplementary source of food and a practical lesson in agriculture for students who would most likely spend their working lives in some form of agribusiness.

There was no reticulated water in the Mundubbera of the thirties and the garden was watered from the schools's rainwater tanks using watering cans.

All pupils participated willingly because the hands on gardening was a welcome break from the classroom.

We also planted trees on 'Arbor Day.

Seems to me a positive initiative at a time when we may all need to revisit growing our own food rather than complete reliance on supermarkets to provide our nutritional needs when broadacre farming is experiencing water shortages and reducing production causing a sharp increase in price at the check-out.

There is no reason why we cannot all experience the joys of gardening as our endearing Peter Cundall on the ABC'c gardening series.

My 7y.old attends Collingwood College where i believe Stephanie Alexander's kitchen garden program got started, and it seems nearly as good as its media. I particularly like the hardwired grow-eat connection and the siting on school grounds.

But that doesn't mean one size fits all or there aren't other excellent models out there. Thanks Russ for kicking the wheels on ALPs simplism and reviewing whats already working elsewhere. Hopefully the ALP will be alerted to their clumsiness before too long... surely Ms Alexander can see theres merit in other models too.