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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