National Kitchen Garden Awards 2025: winners announced

The winners of the National Kitchen Garden Awards for 2025 have just been announced and we are excited to be a part of the celebration!

Since the call for entries for the 2025 National Kitchen Garden Awards (NKGA) were announced back in July, there’s been a lot of busy schools out there. Submissions were open to all primary schools, secondary schools and early childhood services across Australia, with a chance to win one of nine prize packs, each worth over $4000. All the entries showcased the fun and creativity had by students while growing and cooking at their school.

“We were thrilled to receive almost 500 entries from every corner of Australia, from bustling cities to remote regional communities,” says CEO Rob Rees MBE DL.

“Many celebrated sustainability and inclusivity in beautiful ways, and our nine winners, from a welcoming ‘grub club’ to a student-designed aquaponics system, showcase just how powerfully kitchen gardens can support learning, wellbeing, and a sense of community.”  

The 27 finalists, selected by the NKGA organisers, were presented to the celebrity judges who delighted in seeing what our future gardeners are getting up to during their selection process.

“Another fantastic year full of creativity and engagement,” Thanh Truong (aka the Fruit Nerd) said. “The finalists were all amazing, which made choosing difficult as all were winner

The winners

Category: Beyond the School Gate

Entries in this category shared examples of how their school’s kitchen or garden had an effect out in the community, beyond their school gates. For example, did students take excess produce to a local market?

Winner: Fairview Kindergarten, SA

At our preschool, the garden doesn’t stop at the gate, it keeps on giving! With help from our local Men’s Shed, our children proudly co-designed a vibrant Grow Free Cart, paired with a Little Library and Pantry, as a gift to the community.

Each week, little hands work hard in our vegie patch, growing fresh produce not just for themselves, but to share with others, sparking conversations about kindness, health, and sustainability. The cart has become a hub of connection: families pop by to grab a zucchini or a book and sometimes drop off their own garden goodies.

Category: Down to Earth

Sponsored by ABC Organic Gardener

This category is all about getting your hands dirty – the essence of gardening! Entrants needed to demonstrate their understanding of the importance soils and the need to nurture their kitchen garden.

Winner: John Colet School, NSW

Our permaculture garden demonstrates a circular food system in an urban school, educating 100 children each week. We respect and acknowledge the traditional custodians, the Garigal people, and work hard to protect the native ecosystem onsite, including the endangered Grevillea Cayleii.

The garden contributes to the school kitchen where 300 people eat lunch together each day. In 2024, its first year, 164kgs of food was grown and over 2 tonnes of food waste was composted! We believe that this is because of the soil food web that we continue to foster.

Category: First Nations Foods

We’d love to see how schools are incorporating First Nations Foods into their learnings. Do you have a bush tucker garden? Do you plan according to your local Indigenous season?

Winner: West Coast Steiner School, WA

Our garden now flourishes with WA native plants such as macadamia, lemon myrtle, native river mint, finger lime, bush basil, saltbush, and Kakadu plum. We follow the Noongar six-season calendar, observing how nature signals when to plant, harvest and rest. When the honey-scented flowers of jarrah bloom, we know the warm days are here and certain plants will thrive.

Category: Flower Power

Sponsored by ABC Gardening Australia

We want to hear about how your kitchen garden has attracted buzzing pollinators, grown the tallest sunflowers, boosted local biodiversity or offered up beautiful bouquets for your shared feasts.

Winner: Bundaberg Special School, QLD

Students have been growing flowers to help attract pollinators into our farm for quite a while. Within our herb garden we have a native beehive, which the students love checking, we often spend time trying to find them in the garden area on the herbs and flowers.

Category: Recipe of the Imagination

Educators shared what their classes have been cooking up in the kitchen with fresh, seasonal and delicious produce, whether a reinvented classic or a vegie-packed original.

Winner: East Devonport Primary School, TAS

Faced with an abundant harvest of silverbeet from our school garden, each class rolled up their sleeves and got cooking! Over several sessions, students prepared and froze multiple batches of burger mix until we had enough to serve 200 delicious burgers—feeding the entire school.

Our Cheesy Beet Burgers were a hit! Made with a hearty mix of: fresh silverbeet, homemade breadcrumbs (crafted from breakfast club loaf ends), eggs, grated cheese, and our vegetable stock paste.

Each burger was served with garden slaw and our tomato relish. Gluten-free and dairy-free versions were created using GF bread and DF cheese. These burgers were shaped into rectangles for easy identification and cooked/served separately.

Category: Sustainable Solutions

Share some of the ways you’ve learned about sustainable practices in the kitchen or garden. Have you initiated composting, recycling, reusing, or reducing?

Winner: YMCA Childrens Centre, ACT

Composting has become a key focus. With a compost bin kindly donated by a family, children are learning how food scraps can be turned into rich soil for our vegie garden. Food scraps from the chicken house are now used in our compost, closing the loop in our garden cycle.

Category: The Art of Kitchen Gardening

The garden and fresh ingredients often inspire storytelling and artistic pursuits. Show us how you’re encouraging creativity with your class through the kitchen garden.

Winner: Lucknow Kindergarten, VIC

Our sunflowers were getting attacked by birds, so we responded by creating scarecrows to scare the birds away. Every part of the scarecrows were either recycled or reused. The children brought their ideas together to create two unique, yet equally creative scarecrows to firstly scare away the birds, and secondly add some colour and fun to our garden space.

Category: Water Wise Design

Has your school or early childhood service embraced smart, sustainable garden design to make the most of every drop? This award celebrates innovative approaches to water-efficient gardening and resourceful thinking.

Winner: Stanmore Public School, NSW

All the water used in the kitchen garden is from rain watertanks fed from roof run off. All the beds in the garden are fully irrigated with timed sprinklers. We have two frog habitats with flowing water using solar powered pumps to circulate and aerate the water. Parents and students recently constructed an aquaponics system designed by students using two found bath tubs and a discarded table frame.

Category: Wellbeing Champions

We know getting hands-on in the kitchen and garden is great for our mental health, fitness and wellbeing but schools in this category needed to show how their activities have improved the wellbeing of their students.

Winner: Woodbridge Primary School, WA

At Woodbridge Primary School, we pride ourselves on developing the whole child. We provide classroom students, particularly those who require additional support, the opportunity to experience some hands-on time with nature, planting and harvesting in our kitchen garden.

Our Grub Club is a holistic approach; students are taught to grow and harvest the garden produce, read recipes, follow instructions, maintain health and safety, and to celebrate their successes in the kitchen with the wider community.

Join a growing community

Your school or early learning centre can join the Kitchen Garden Foundation community and gain access to tools, mentoring and expert guidance that will help get your garden growing and your children harvesting. Visit: kitchengardenfoundation.org.au