Gardening for Beginners Course

Learn how to do simple gardening and grow your own garden plants with our home & garden short courses in Sydney!

Are you eager to cultivate your green thumb, beautify your surroundings, and connect with nature? Join us in the College garden for this hands-on Gardening for Beginners workshop, covering the basics of caring for your outdoor green friends.

This class will give you grounded and valuable gardening insights from our experienced tutor, as well as solid advice that you can put into practice in your own outdoor area - from inner-city balcony to country garden. You'll learn reliable methods of care and maintenance, which you can use to create a healthy, thriving green space of your own.

You'll find out how to:

• Improve the quality of life in green and meaningful ways.
• Attract bees and help all plants pollinate their flowers.
• Get confident with house plants by knowing the simple tips for long-term health and vitality.
• Use the vast abundance of solar power to grow new life, produce more oxygen, and generate new sources of healthy food.
• Join the happiness economy with fresh herbs and vegetables.
• Be your own micro-producer and share fresh produce with friends and neighbours.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this Gardening for Beginners course, you should be able to:

• Choose plants that will fit your space, look good, and perform well.
• Grow healthy outdoors plants.
• Select suitable composts and garden mixes for your garden areas.
• Establish and maintain new plants with confidence.
• Apply practical horticultural skills to other plants and gardens.

Course content

What will be covered in this Gardening for Beginners course?

This is a beginner course in Gardening that covers the fundamental basics of good gardening - indoor or outdoors. It will cover:

Watering

• How much and how frequently
  • Infiltration – how quickly water gets into the soil
  • Aeration – the need for oxygen as well as water
  • Drainage – how quickly water drains away
• Irrigation
  • Manual vs automatic

Ground support

• Soil structure
• Garden soils & mixes
• Potting mixes & Composts
• Soil texture & tests
• Drainage

Garden operations

• Care & maintenance
• Mulching vs weeding
• Fertilising

Types of plants

• Indoor–outdoor
• Sunshine–shade
• Dry–wet
• Herbs
• Vegetables
• Flowers
• Shrubs and trees
• The top 10 all-time favourites

Intended audience

Who is this Gardening for Beginners course for?

This course is for people with or without green thumbs, and with or without big garden spaces. It's for people who have problem areas that need fixing up, and they don’t know where to start, or how to do it. It’s for people who want to be gardeners and find out how, and who want to bypass making rookie mistakes or throwing away good money on bad products. If that’s you, whether you are renting or owning, we can find a solution for your garden spaces. 

Course venue

Rozelle Campus

2A Gordon Street, Rozelle NSW 2039 (corner of Gordon St & Victoria Rd in the grounds of St. Joseph's Church)

Course materials

What to bring to class

• Gardening gloves (tight fit is better for gardening work)
• A face mask (to protect against potting mix/garden soil bacteria like Legionella)
• Sharp secateurs / garden snips/scissors or kitchen scissors
• Small hand spade tool
• Small bag to carry small pots
• Wet weather gear / sun hat if required
• If you have excess plants - please bring these in to share with the group, to use in practical tasks, or to join the College garden