Forced salad leaves and bird boxes

Our first gardening club after half term - welcome to all our new members! 

We checked on the chicory, dandelion and other salad leaves we had planted before the holiday and left in the cupboard and lo and behold....

This kind of growing is called 'forcing'. We'll leave them for a bit longer before we can cut them and eat them in a delicious salad. 

Today we were also talking about birds and why they are good for the garden. We had a look around the garden to get inspiration for decorating cardboard birdboxes we have made from kits. 

We looked at some pictures of other birdboxes and then designed our own patterns and shapes.

We made up the kits - we'll decorate them with our designs next week.

It's still quite cold in the garden - we took the temperature from the thermometer at 6.1C and made a note on the chart.

Forcing chicory in the cupboard

First we dug up the chicory from the garden....

...then we washed them and cut the leaves off leaving only the roots and a small part of the leaves.

Next we planted the roots in pots filled with soil...

   ...after that we put the pots in a dark cupboard. Once they have grown we will put them in a salad (with the roots cut off).

Time to Grow Potatoes

This will be our third growing season. Seeds for this summer's crops have already been ordered, some of them from Garden Organic (www.gardenorganic.org.uk). They have been chosen by Stephen Mason our school gardener (www.greenspacemanagement.net.) The most unusual thing Steve has picked out is a pine berry, it's a white strawberry with red seeds that tastes intensely of pineapple.

We all love potatoes and they are one of first things you can plant even when the ground is still quite cold. Our seed potatoes are in the potting shed and ready for chitting.

Chitting means allowing sprouts to form in a dry frost free place. This helps the tubers (seed potatoes) get off to a good start. Just remember to plant them with the shoots pointing up not down! We will plant them in March and harvest them in June or July.

Digging up potatoes is like finding buried treasure under ground. Last year we grew enough potatoes to feed the whole school (well for one school dinner anyway).

Cress and Fat Balls

Our cress heads have grown! We were very excited.  We looked at the one growing under the cover - its leaves were much paler than the others, because it had grown in the dark.

In the winter time the birds get very hungry. This week we made fat balls for the birds in our garden. We got the kitchen to save some yoghurt pots from lunch.

We made a hole in the bottom (in the middle)  so we could thread some string through. We cut a length of string and tied a knot at the end then threaded it through the yoghurt pot.

Meanwhile some of us melted some suet (fat) in the microwave and stirred in some bird seed.  You need 1 kg of seed and about 500g fat. Then we packed the pots with the fat/seed mix, made sure the string came out of the middle of the pot and left them to set until next week.

Here is a picture of a fat ball that we made, we hung them up on our trees and fences.