Tuesday 28th February 2017

A surprise Fruit Garden!

 

Today felt a little bit like Christmas when a giant, mystery brown box arrived on our doorstep!

For the past year we have been working to gain our RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) award. Our eventual aim is to make level 5 status which is only awarded to schools who set up their own school gardens, use the produce and continually develop them by making sure horticulture and home grown food are on the school curriculum.

As a part of completing our level 4 award we were given a voucher to spend at ‘Rocket gardens’. Basically they are a company who grow seedlings to supply to gardens, ready to be set. Our mystery box contained a whole range of fruits from strawberries to red currants, with everything in between!!

Today we managed to set them all in a new ‘fruit garden’ and rhubarb patch that we created!

What do you think to the rhubarb? The larger plants were kindly donated by Mrs Bowles and her father. By researching we discovered that we could split the plants in half to gain a bigger crop!

Class 4 were great at identifying the rest of the fruit plants. It wasn’t easy as the leaves hadn’t grown back after the autumn and some of the labels had fallen off! But after careful reasoning, all were identified. Our next learning was a little more scientific as we had to read the planting guide to work out where it would be best to plant each bush in our beds. A complex task as by watching the beds throughout the day we learned that some parts of the beds have sun in the morning, some in the afternoon and some not at all! A great starting point to discuss the Earth, sun and changing seasons!

So much learning in a realistic context!