The children set up a gardening club as part of our Eco-flag application for 2024/2025. We bought resources from parent contributions (Enjoy Benefits) to help us begin our process.
The children have experience with growing herbs in their classroom and using these herbs to add to pizzas and pasta to eat.
With the success of this, we decided to begin a gardening club, were we could begin growing our own fruit and vegetables at nursery, with the hope of eating them on day.
When all our resources came, the children helped fill our planting bags with soil and compost before choosing what vegetables we were going to plant. Once planted they were given lots of water from all the children to help them grow.
Do you know where our secret gardening patch and greenhouse is?
Potatoes – Carrots – Strawberries
The first three vegetables and fruit we decided to plant, were Potatoes, Carrots and Strawberries. We planted these back in April/May. Now in June we have had a huge success with our potatoes.
However, our poor carrots and strawberries have not been so successful.
We asked for some guidance from one of our parents to help us with our next step. What could we improve on?
As the summer is now here, we are limited to what we can plant.
The children choose to plant Peas, Beans and Broccoli. We have now learnt from our first experience that we are going to grow the seeds individually into seedlings then we will transfer them into our larger planting bags and keep them safe in our greenhouse.
We are a little late but we hope to be able to successfully grow a pumpkin/s next to the tree in the car park, keep a look out to see if we succeed?
Help, guidance and support is always welcome to help us on our gardening journey.
Come back soon to see if we successfully harvested our potatoes at the end of August / September.
Update –
We successfully harvested our potatoes at the end of August. We took our grow bags into the garden and emptied all the contents for the children to dig and explore to find the potatoes.
Look at what we grew?
We excitedly washed the potatoes upstairs in the classroom.
Next we asked Bhati our Head Chef to cook our potatoes. She kindly made us chips to eat.
We have loved this process of planting, growing, harvesting and eating the food we have grow.
Our last vegetable we planted was peas. We planted the seeds in small pots and grew them inside our greenhouse away from all the slugs. They grew really fast. Look!
Once they were ready, we transferred the pots into two of our grow bags.
The slugs have got to some of the leaves on the peas, so we are now going to cover the bags, and hope they will continue to grow. As we want to see can we eat these too.
Finally, our Pumpkin has not blossomed as well as we would have liked at this stage, but we are still hopeful, we can enter it into our Pumpkin Parade this year.
Next year we cant wait to learn from these skills and hopefully be more successfully in our gardening. Watch this space!
BBM
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