Community
3 December, 2025
Chip day at Timboon P-12
TIMBOON P-12 School Year Nine and 10 Agriculture and Horticulture (AgHort) students spent a day preparing hot chips for their fellow classmates after a successful potato harvest.
On Thursday, November 27, after harvesting and cleaning up to 300 kilograms of potatoes, the AgHort students prepared them to be sold at school for a hot chip lunch day.
The students planted their very own potatoes months ago, with fears they wouldn’t survive the wet conditions of spring.
Year 10 student Ruby Pender said she was unsure the harvest would prove fruitful, so was pleasantly surprised with the outcome.
“It was quite a good experience. It took about four months from planting to eating,” she said.
“I didn’t have much faith in it, to be honest.
“We had this potato specialist come in and he was saying that they wouldn’t grow very good if they got too wet and it was quite wet.
“The whole process was quite interesting – it was something I didn’t know much about.”
Year 10 student Oliver Makin said it was interesting to see the potatoes grow over time and finally be able to eat them after all their hard work.
“It was kind of weird. We didn’t go up to the potato field for like four weeks since we planted them then we went up and they were all just sprouted and just shooting in the sky so that was pretty good,” he said.
“It was pretty exciting when we got to dig them up too.
“Agriculture and horticulture is an elective I picked, because I didn’t really like any of the other electives to be honest, but it’s come out good, I’ve really enjoyed it.
“I am excited to eat them, they look really good.”
AgHort teacher Michael Braham said this was the first year they had tried planting potatoes and he was pleasantly surprised by the success.
“The AgHort program is something we do every year and it’s usually semester based,” he said.
“The potatoes idea was a new one, so up at the back we’ve had lavender historically but nobody has really been doing anything with it for the last couple of years.
“So I thought, we’ve got the space, we may as well do something with it, and potatoes are a reasonably hands off crop so I thought we’d give that a go and see what we could get out of it and it’s turned out pretty good.”
Mr Braham said the program was great for giving students experience outside the classroom.
“I think the students get to see something from conception right through to fruition,” he said.
“They get a lot of hands on, practical experience.
“They get to realise that it’s not all just fun and games when it comes to agriculture and we’ve worked in a lot of other units within it.
“We’ve looked at technology in agriculture, they did a fly-by of the field and mapped it, they even dumped some of our natural pesticide that we cooked up on it as well and that was really good for the kids to see.”
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