Winter gardening

The frost has come and the ground is too hard and cold for us to work. Instead we've been thinking of ways of using fruits, seeds and leaves to decorate our homes for Christmas time.

We've been making pomanders, a traditional way of scenting homes by sticking cloves into oranges.

All you need are some oranges, ribbon and cloves.

It's easier to make a hole in the orange with a sharp pencil or toothpick.

The cloves are sharp and they will break if you just try and push them in.

As you can see we made lots. If you keep them somewhere warm they'll dry out and scent your house with spicy smells.

We've also been making wreathes out of ivy and pine.

We coloured in birds made from stamps.

Then coiled our ivy and pine into circles and tied on the birds.

This is our last post for a little while.

Whilst our garden sleeps our gardening club is taking a break.

We'll be back in April with two new beds planned (herbs and plants to make dye).

Until then wishing everyone a very Happy Christmas and fruitful New Year.

Bird baths

As well as being beautiful to watch and listen to, birds are really important for our garden. They eat pests such as aphids and other insects and also help to spread seeds and pollinate flowers. 

At this time of year there's not so much food for the birds and they can also get short of water. So it's important to provide them with water to drink and bathe in. 

This week we made a bird bath for our garden and some small bird baths to take home. 

First we took some stones and rocks and gave them a good wash. 

We picked a large plant pot saucer from the potting shed. The birds need shallow water so they don't fall in and drown.  We filled the tray with the clean rocks so the birds have a place to perch. 

We thought about where in the garden we should put the bird bath. We found a quiet spot in the orchard where the birds wouldn't be disturbed too much. We also put it in a visible place so if a predator like a cat came along the birds could see it in time to fly away. 

We filled the bath with water and re-arranged the stones so they weren't all under water. 

Then we went back to the classroom to make our own mini bird baths, using shells, rocks and shallow saucers. We labelled them and took them home to put in our own garden or backyard. 

Winter peas and diaries

We like to keep a journal of what we do in Gardening Club. It helps us to remember interesting things about the garden - we can look back on it and see what the weather was like, what we planted - and where we planted it! This week we started our journals for the new school year by decorating the front of our garden diaries. 

The first thing we recorded was some planting. Even though it's nearly winter, some seeds are hardy enough to deal with the cold. There was space in some of the beds where we dug up the potatoes, so we planted some winter peas. We looked on the seed packet to find out how far apart we should plant the seeds and how deep they should be planted. We dug a shallow drill (a long line or groove in the soil) and used a ruler to measure the distances. 

Then we wrote about what we did in our new journals.  The hard pea seeds made us think of the story of the princess and the pea! 

Hackney in Bloom

During the summer term of 2013 we entered our school garden for the Hackney in Bloom competition. We wanted to share the pride we feel about our school garden with other Hackney residents.  We were delighted to find out that we had been awarded Bronze in the 'Young and Green Fingered' category,  awarded to up and coming gardeners under the age of 21 who have created and care for a garden. The judges were looking for originality, design, colour, quality and sustainability. 

Last Tuesday the 8th October we went along to the Hackney Marshes Centre to a lovely awards ceremony. It was great to hear about all the exciting gardening that's going on in Hackney and we felt really inspired to find out more about other gardens in Hackney and enter again next year! You can find out more about Hackney in Bloom here.

Saving Seeds for Next Year

As we bring in the harvest we are starting to see plants in the garden that have finished producing fruit and flowers.  We have let some of the plants 'go to seed' - partly because this encourages lots of different insects and birds to come to the garden to eat the seed, and partly because we want to save the seed from these plants.  If we carefully take good quality seeds from the plants, dry them and save them in a safe dry place then we can plant them next year and get more fruit and flowers - it's a wonderful gardening cycle!   

We took the last runner bean pods from the runner bean plants. The pods had got too big and tough to eat but the beans inside were beautifully big and purple. We carefully took them out of the pods and put them on some paper to dry out a bit, before putting them in envelopes to save in a draw for next year.

We did the same with some lovely Cosmos and Marigold flowers.  We're a step closer to getting a good  harvest and flower show in our garden next year. 

New Year Harvest

It's back to school and we're very glad to welcome some new Gardening Club members for our first session of the new school term. The garden's done quite well over the summer (thank you, watering team!) and we can now harvest the fruit and vegetables of our labours.

First we had a look at the apple tree outside the nursery and reception classrooms.  It's a big tree which gives lots of cooking apples - which means they are a bit sour if you eat them straight from the tree, they taste nicer when they've been cooked. There were lots of windfalls lying around which we collected.....

...and sorted into ones which we can store to use later and those which are beyond their best but can still be composted. 

We washed the good apples and wrapped them in newspaper. 

We hope they will store well in a box in the potting shed. But there are lots more on the tree - we're planning to have our own 'Apple Day' in a few days, so watch this space! 

Keeping Growing

At this time of year the garden needs even more looking after than usual. It's important to keep an eye on the crops to make sure you will get the best from them at harvest time.

Our first task this week was to give the garden a good soaking. Luckily gardening club is after school so it's after the hottest sun of the day. It's better to water when it's cooler so the water doesn't immediately evaporate. Also it's good to try to water at the base of the stem of the plant so the water goes to the roots where it's needed. 

 


 We've also been keeping an eye on our compost heap - we make sure our apple cores and banana skins from fruit time go into the compost bin.  That way we can make sure we have plenty of compost to feed the soil for next years' crops.

 Last but not least we are keeping an eye on the fruit and vegetable plants. This week we learnt how to pinch out tomato plants - that means snapping or "pinching" off extra shoots that grow in between the main stalk and the side shoots. We want to make sure the plants' efforts go into producing tomatoes, not too many shoots and leaves.

We (mostly) love salad!

The school garden is looking splendid and we're enjoying all the wonderful work there is to do. 

Gardening Club is fantastic when we can spend most of it in the garden! 

Some of our salad leaves were ready to pick so we decided to do some tasting. We picked a selection, washed them and laid them out. They looked wonderful and very delicious.

Most of us tried them all - we even liked the ones that were peppery. Soon there were none left!

There were also some broad beans ready to be picked. It's very exciting opening them up to see what's inside. The cases are furry and soft inside to keep the beans safe.  We compared the taste of the bigger beans and of the smaller beans. The smaller ones were softer and sweeter. 

We ate them straight from the pod. At this time of year the garden needs a lot of water. Watering takes time but it's something we really enjoy - it gives us an excuse to examine the plants and check how they are all growing. 

Since our garden is in a playground used by the whole school it's sometimes difficult to keep the plants safe. With the best will in the world ball games, skipping, running and chasing (and just plain old curiosity) sometimes take their toll on the garden. To remind others to be careful of the plants we made some signs. 

It's quite hard to find the right balance. We want everyone to enjoy the garden but we also want the plants to thrive.