Growing salad in the cupboard?

FORCING CHICORY & TASTING WINTER SALADS

Salad isn't just for summer. This week we have been tasting different kinds of winter salad.

We tasted: giant red mustard (very hot!), sorrel (very lemony), rocket (very peppery) and chicory (very bitter). Nearly everyone tried all of the leaves but some people needed a drink from the water fountain afterwards
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We wrote down the names of the salad and then got on with forcing chicory which is a very tasty winter salad that puts up with cold and wet (you may find the odd slug).

We had some chicory dug up from a summer sowing. It looked like this. We trimmed it and put into a pot of earth. We put two pots under a tarpaulin in our potting shed cupboard. When it grows in the dark it grows quickly and makes paler less  bitter leaves. What will it look like next week?

Maybe it will look a bit like this picture.

We had time to draw a great big chicory leaf and make labels for our pots. 

Seed saving

Saving seed to use next year is fun and it means you can grow plants and crops for free next season! 

We have let quite a few of our flowers and vegetable plants 'go to seed' so that we can collect the seeds in envelopes to use next year.

We collected artichoke heads....  

...runner bean seeds....

....and lots of flower seed heads like these sunflowers.

Then we counted the seeds and put them in envelopes. We drew pictures on the envelopes and added their names, along with instructions on when to plant them. 

Salsa time!

It's harvest time and we had a good look around the garden to see how the plants and tress were looking.  Our new orchard is doing well - some of the heritage apple trees we planted last year are already bearing fruit! 

We picked some overripe tomatoes and some apples as well as some herbs from the new herb beds we planted up in the spring. We took some garlic that had been drying in the potting shed over the summer. 

We cut up the tomatoes and whizzed them up with some onion and garlic in a food processor, to make a fresh tomato salsa. Then we added the fresh herbs. 

We used three different herbs - chives, oregano and savoury. They all smelled and tasted different. We put some in each batch of salsa. In one of them we added a little bit of chilli - some of us like our salsa hot!   

Then we got some crackers and had a big tasting session before writing down the recipe in our gardening diaries. Yummy! 

The Summer Fair

The annual school Summer Fair is a great opportunity to share and show what we do in Gardening Club. And we can raise some money for the school at the same time by selling plants that we have grown!  

Some very kind parents and friends have donated some beautiful plants to sell on the plant stall and we have also grown some of our own seedlings to sell. 

We made some signs for the stall and thought about designing a logo for gardening club. We thought of using a ladybird logo, or a bee, or a flower! 

We counted out and put in envelopes some seeds to share with visitors to the Gardening Club stall. These are nasturtium and sunflower seeds. 

Meanwhile the garden is growing up fast. There were lots more carrot seedlings that needed to be planted out...

...and watered - it's a busy time of year in the garden! 

Of Aubergines and Mini-beasts

Steve, our wonderful school gardener, asked us to pot up some aubergine seedlings. We had a look at the little seedlings, an older and bigger aubergine plant and some fully grown aubergines. Hopefully our aubergine plants will give us aubergines like these! 

Mature aubergine plant

Aubergine seedling

The aubergine seeds had been planted in plug trays (trays with lots of little cells, one for each seed). They had grown well - now the plants need more room to grow so we moved them into bigger pots with more soil for the roots to stretch out. 

With the seedlings potted up and watered, we had a look around our garden for mini-beasts. Plenty of  mini-beasts are a sign of a really healthy garden.  We found bees and worms and woodlice as well as spiders, aphids and snails. 

Afterwards we wrote in our diaries which mini-beasts we found. Then we made up our own mythical mini-beasts and plants. These are the pictures we drew:

Thanks to Hannah B for taking such beautiful photos this week! 

Garlic.....Bread!

Last week we dug up some garlic to make room for our bean poles.

For this week's Gardening Club Jojo kindly made garlic bread for the group to share -- before we got down to the serious business of watering the garden! 

It was so delicious we thought we would post the recipe in the blog in case anyone would like to make their own.  Thanks Jojo! 

Take two bulbs of green garlic you have grown yourself.....

                        Some fresh parsley...                                          ...some good butter and crusty bread.

Trim the garlic bulbs and peel off the outer skin to reveal the garlic cloves.

Finely chop the garlic and parsley...

 ...then mash them with 100g of the softened butter.

Cut slices in the bread -- about three quarters of the way into the loaf so that it doesn't fall apart.

Wrap the loaf loosely in parchment and bake at 200C for twenty minutes. 

Scoff it while it's still warm!

You can find other delicious recipes from Jojo here.

Bean Diaries

We have all got garden journals so that we can make a record of what we have done in the garden over the year. This means we can remind ourselves when we planted things and what grew well and what did not.

This week we used our diaries to record the growth of our climbing beans that we planted before half term.  All of our beans had sprouted, some of them had grown a lot!

We thought the beans would look fantastic climbing up a bean pole teepee in one of our beds.  So we harvested the onions and garlic that had been growing there.... 

....dug the earth and broke up the soil a bit. We then put up a bean pole wigwam. 

We planted our beans and gave them a really good water to help them settle in to their new home.