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.