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A Day in the Life of a GF student
Each morning the students are collected from their homes – some in Masakhane near Gansbaai and others from Stanford. Wearing their Green Futures overalls and bright red caps the students are driven up to their classroom, which is a beautiful stone-clad building surrounded by milkwood trees with far reaching views over Walker Bay. The morning lessons usually start with practical life skills where students are helped through various subjects such as their learners and drivers licence test, basic banking and budgeting, business skills and health issues. Each day the college provides students with a hearty breakfast and then it’s on with the theory sessions until lunch. Our curriculum is multidisciplinary, focussing on environmental and conservation issues as well as horticulture and landscaping techniques. Each week students learn a new group of indigenous plants, their growth requirements and how to use them in a garden. We explore all aspects of growing and caring for fynbos plants and their use in garden layout and design. We don’t focus only on fynbos but also provide students with useful knowledge in growing and caring for vegetables and fruit trees and care and maintenance of a variety of machinery and equipment.
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After
a hearty lunch prepared by the Grootbos kitchen the students head outside
to put their newly acquired knowledge to practical use. We collect seeds
and cuttings in the nature reserve and propagate our own plants in the
college’s green house. We learn about feeding, watering and pruning
of nursery plants, design and lay out of fynbos gardens, rock wall and
path construction, building water features, caring for lawns, vegetable
gardens and much, much more. The practical sessions are generally held
in the school's nursery and in the Grootbos gardens, however we also choose
a variety of commercial landscaping projects each year to provide the
students with working experience in different environments. Regular visits
to botanical gardens, nature reserves and other places of interest add
an extra element of fun and learning to the Green Futures program.