My Garden

The Autumn term has flown by in a haze of heat and dust in the East of England making typical autumn garden activities difficult such as weeding and clearing beds and bulb planting. The plus side has been an extended season of harvesting tomatoes - this has to have been the best year for outdoor tomato growing in the East of England for some years. 

I have taken children of Thurston Primary School on a seed safari of their school grounds to discover the autumn bounty of seeds there amongst the hedges and trees as well as the vegetable and flowers. Seed collecting is a great autumn term gardening activitiy whether it is the french beans that weren't harvested at the end of term so they now have seeds rattling in their seed pods, the lettuce that has bolted and now has a fluffy towering branching seed head, or the sweet peas that flowered all summer.These seeds can be collected by children, dropped into envelopes or seed packet templates that the children can cut out and stick. A good literacy lesson when writing seed growing instructions...

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The autumn sowings of broad beans and peas are ready for harvesting now - infact - we picked over 3 kilograms of broad beans at Brampton Village Primary - just before half term. Autumn planted onions and garlic will be ready soon too. Radishes were also eaten by pupils.

Its been a busy summer term., sowing and planting the tender vegetables such as french beans, courgettes, pumpkins and tumblng tomatoes, as well as repeat sowings of salads, carrots and radishes.
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I have been busy over the last 6 weeks running twilight teacher training sessions (after school hours) to teaching staff and others interested in school gardening on what to sow and grow this spring term. I work with 10 schools across the eastern region, RHS Garden Hyde Hall and The People's Community Garden in Ipswich, using these as 'hubs' to hold training sessions for teachers in the vicinity.

This half term has been about preparing the soil for spring sowing and planting, warming the soil for early crops and  sowing the hardy vegetables crops before the easter break. It has been great to get sowing and planting in school gardens after all the hard work of building beds and filling them  with soil and compost!

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Children from Cherry Tree Primary School worked along side RHS Hyde Hall gardener  Andrew Hellman, myself,  parent volunteers and teachers to build 8 plastic raised beds that will form the basis of their new vegeteble garden.

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 Costessey High school is busy building a new growing area to support  the new Environment and Land based diploma that will start in schools from September 2009.

Back in the autumn I worked with Year 11 GSCE science students to design  the new garden, measuring the plot and marking out the new beds. 

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Despite the torrential rain, I joined a team of parents, grand parents, the head teacher and her husband, who had  volunteered to help build new raised beds in the school garden at Fairhaven Primary school. 

Broads Authority Countryside Rangers also came along with volunteers to carry out woodland management on the overgrown ash trees that were taking valuable light from the growing area

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 Last week I visited Pott Row First School in Kings Lynn  - the first school in the eastern region to reach level 5 of the RHS Campaign for School Gardening Benchmarking scheme.

The school's prize is a day with RHS educaton staff doing fun gardening activities, plus a tree or plant of their choice planted in their school grounds

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 Its been busy few weeks in the RHS Partner school gardens in the eastern region.

I have been working with Browick Road Infants School planting their new school allotment with fruit. We planted raspberry canes 'Autumn Bliss' . This is an autumn fruiting raspberry - that fits in well with the school garden calendar - the children return in September to an autumn harvest of raspberries. Summer fruiting raspberries fruit in the summer holidays - of little use to schools, unless there is a holiday club. Autumn raspberries are also relatively easy to manage with a prune to ground level in early spring and you may get away with no supportng wires.

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 Autumn is a great time to get ahead with your school garden. Any planting and preparation you do now will ensure an earlier harvest in the spring and summer terms ahead.

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 I went along to the opening of a new school garden this week at Holland Park Primary School in Clacton.  This is a great example of a well organised school garden - a result of careful planning, full staff involvement and community support from Clacton in Bloom volunteer - Maureen Goodwin who regularly helps the children in the garden.

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At the beginning of the summer holidays 40 staff from Norwich Union built a raised bed allotment garden on the site of an old play gound at Browick Road Infants School in Norfolk.

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It is almost at the end of the summer term and the schools I have visited over the last week are in harvest mode, lifting potatoes and harvesting peas, carrots, French beans, salads and beetroot.

There can be no greater joy than gathering the egg sized new potatoes. Children literally fight for the last potato and we looked at the different sizes and sorted them into the large good ones and the smaller, green or damaged piles. With one group we estimated how many potatoes we would get from each potato then dug up the first one. Our guess could then be more accurate the next time when we had seen the yield from one potato plant. We compared the yield from one bed to another. The first bed had a greater yield. We discussed why this may be so, was it the water supplied to this bed. Could the overhanging trees have lead to a lower yield - taking light, water and nutrients form the soil

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Not so long ago I helped students of Shuttleworth College and children at Brampton Primary school to complete the new Sensory Garden, which looks fantastic!

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I attended the East Feast Open Forum.  16 schools have formed a creative partnership with Eastfeast a charity that provides participating schools with artistic practitioners to stimulate creative learning.  I have been working with some of these schools.  Spring Meadow Primary School for example is one of my "hub" schools, when I hold Twilight Training.  It was a great day, with each school giving a presentation of their school garden.  It was a great way to share ideas and inspiration

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Hi all,

I recently visited Southfield Junior School, Peterborough.  The school was having a fun run and plant sale to raise funds for its school gardening project and celebrate their new Victorian garden. The children had a non-uniform day (mufti), instead of paying £1 to wear non-uniform; children had to bring in a plant.  This generated a lot of plants and then gardening club parents grew more plants for sale

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