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. 

Insects

This week, as the garden bursts into life, we are thinking about insects and how they help the garden. 

We want to encourage biodiversity - many insects and bugs - in the garden. Insects can help pollinate the plants, provide food for birds, help to make compost from waste and improve the soil.  

 We had a look in the garden to see how many insects we could find. We found quite a lot of flies, spiders, bees, worms and snails.  The insects were living where it was dark and dank, underneath stones or in the soil. We collected some in a tray to look at them before putting them back where we found them. 

Insects love living in old wood and among things like hollowed out pipes.  We got some pallets that were going to be thrown away and took them to the potting shed to turn them into an insect hotel.  We cut some bamboo and hollowed it out with sticks. We used some old clay pots as well as some sticks from the playground and some saw dust and a few wooden offcuts. 

We tied the bamboo and sticks in bundles and put the old pots and bricks inside the pallets. 

We left the hotel and hope we'll get some insect visitors soon! 

Growing season

 It's growing season and our plants need plenty of water. The tarmac around our raised beds bounces up the heat and the soil dries out very quickly.

We spent time giving the beds a really good soaking especially our potatoes which are growing well and needed earthing up last week. This means pulling the soil up around the stems so the potatoes growing underneath don't go green.

Before we did the watering we taught ourselves about the different parts of a flower by drawing giant chalk cross sections of a flower onto the playground.

At the end of our hour we had a look to see if anything was ready for harvest and found these broad beans:

We ate them straight out of the pod - yum!

Chelsea Fringe at Lauriston School Garden

We had a lovely day in the school garden and potting shed as part of this year's Chelsea Fringe. It was great to see all the people who came along!  Many thanks to our fantastic gardener Stephen Mason of Greenspace Management and local artist Katherine Tulloh who helped us organise and run the day. Also to the very hardworking and supportive staff from our school and to all the wonderful members of Gardening Club (and their parents) who helped out on the day and showed visitors around the garden.  It was wonderful to celebrate the school garden with everyone.

We used some of Katherine's beautiful printing blocks to make garden prints and she helped us make mini scarecrows to keep the birds away from the seedlings we planted out with Steve.

We were lucky to have a bit of sunshine over the spring sprouting garden. Plus we were treated to a delicious spread of cream teas and cakes donated by parents and members of the Lauriston School Association.