Real Life Homeschooling Story: From Dahlia Kids to Grandma Moa

Hi! I’m Milly, I’m 15 years old, and I’ve been homeschooled (or Unschooled, really) with my sisters Gracie and Lexi for most of my life. 

Some of you might recognise us from The Spinoff’s Home Education documentary series a few years ago. Back then we were living in Northland, where a $100 challenge from Mum had somehow turned into us running our own dahlia Pick-Your-Own business, Green Footed Kiwi. We grew thousands of dahlias from seed, opened our garden to visitors, entered flower shows, sold flowers and eventually wrote a book about the whole adventure. It was amazing!

Since then, life has changed a whole heap. We’ve moved all the way down to Oamaru, and we’ve started creating a new and improved business at our new home, Moa Gardens.

One of my new projects is called Letters to Grandma Moa, and it started because I realised that I really missed something about our old flower farm.

We had a lot of garden clubs, retirement-home groups and older visitors come to visit us at Green Footed Kiwi. My sisters and I loved to show them around, talk about flowers and hear their stories! They’d tell us about the gardens they’d had, things they’d done when they were young and occasionally give us rather excellent advice!

When we moved, I kept thinking about those connections. I also thought about how many grandparents and grandchildren live a long way apart (including ours), and how easy it is for all those amazing stories to simply never get asked about.

I wanted to create something that combined some of my favourite things: writing, drawing and creating characters, with something else I really love: hearing older people’s stories and helping different generations connect.

So I started drawing moas!

There's four of them, and they’re called Sage, Willow, Rocket and Poppy, and they live in a flower garden by the sea. Every month, one of them writes a real letter and sends it to their "Grandma Moa" through the post.

What started as a fun idea has turned into a whole year’s worth of letters, illustrations, activities and postcards! The moa siblings all have their own personalities and ongoing lives in the garden, and each letter continues their story. Poppy, who writes the first letter, is the youngest and is very enthusiastic and curious about everything! She loves butterflies, caterpillars and digging for treasure. Other letters wander through gardening, nature, memories, recipes and whatever trouble the moas have managed to get themselves into that month.  

But underneath all the moa adventures is another idea. The letters are designed to help grandparents connect with their own grandchildren. It’s something I learned to appreciate from our garden visitors, but have never quite worked out how to start with my own grandparents.

A story or question might remind Grandma of something she did when she was young, or give a grandchild something new to ask her about. What did she want to be when she grew up? What games did she play? What did her garden look like? What did her grandmother teach her?

They’re little conversation starters hidden inside the stories.

I’m hoping the letters don’t just give someone something fun to find in their letterbox each month. Hopefully they’ll also lead to stories being told that otherwise might never have been asked about.

People can write back to me at Moa Gardens too, and I’d love to hear their stories, memories and gardening wisdom, but that’s really an extra. The bigger idea is to get stories travelling between generations.

But the fun has really been in the educational side for me in this project. I’ve illustrated everything myself, written all twelve letters, tested ideas and recipes, designed the postcards and learnt an enormous amount about printing, websites, postage, subscriptions and marketing along the way. It really has been my entire education all in one bundle, which is exactly what Green Footed Kiwi became too! The first letters have been available from this September, which is both extremely exciting and slightly terrifying!

And that’s probably the best explanation I can give of what homeschooling looks like for us now.

Gracie is busy with photography and training our Border Collie, Bumblebee. Lexi loves making food and has been developing ideas for the little café we hope to open with naturally flavoured rainbow coloured boba drinks. Meanwhile I’m busy drawing and writing about four moa siblings and discussing international postage rates.

None of those things began as a “school assignment”, and we don’t have individual subjects carefully separated out to make sure we get an “all-round” education. Somehow, it all just happens naturally. Because, after all, what you need for life is really what you need to learn.  

That’s what I love most about learning this way. Green Footed Kiwi began with $100 and some flower seeds. We had absolutely no idea where it would lead. It ended up down a rabbit hole of learning and now has become Letters to Grandma Moa.

I don’t know exactly where this one will lead either, but I think that’s half the fun!

I'm Milly Leong, 15, self-taught entrepreneur to several crazy projects. If you would like to learn more about Grandma Moa or our education style or just follow along google Moa Gardens.