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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