Friday 16^th June 2017

Our first big harvest of 2017

 

After much effort we have finally made our first harvest of the year. Look at our lettuces…they are GIGANTIC!! We managed to keep the pests at bay and keep them well watered though the recent dry spell….our reward…42 perfect lettuces and some succulent rhubarb.

We also had a special visitor today. As much of our produce would be sold to 'The Crown' in Southwold, we invited their head chef (Rory) to take a look at the produce we would be growing for him to cook in their restaurant in 2017.

Our next job was to work out which crops Rory could take away with him today. As a result we also did some mathematics in our gardening slot this week. After working out the average of lettuce prices, based on the four biggest supermarket prices and adding a little for our ‘organic' approach, we decided that 60p would be a fair price to charge. A little multiplication later and we came up with a total of £25.20 for the lettuces with which the pupils would invoice Adnams themselves. Not a bad start at all!

Harvesting our iceberg lettuces.

The Lolla Rosa lettuces look juicy too!

Packaging the lettuces for transport to The Crown, Southwold.

Our next harvest was the rhubarb. This time we had to use our skills of estimation to work out a price. We weighed a bunch of stalks to give us a good idea of the cost per bunch. We then had to multiply that by the number of bunches of rhubarb that we had harvested. Again we discovered a total close to £25! That means that we have already surpassed our income from 2016…a great effort…well done ‘team Food for Thought!

 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday 20^th June 2017

Organic Growing

One of our aims as a business is to grow organic food. If we are going to sustain this (keep it going!) then we are going to need to make our own compost. This would also be a  great opportunity for us to investigate micro-organisms in science!

With class 3 keeping chickens, there was an opportunity for using the chicken manure to make our own compost, full of the rich nutrients that our plants would need to grow strong and healthy. Once produced, we might need to do a science experiment or two to work out an effective dose of our organic compost!

This afternoon we also need to replenish our lettuce beds which have been emptied from our first harvest. We have Italian ‘Canasta lettuce’ to fill the rear beds and cucumber plants for the poly tunnel. We will also need to prepare our first invoices to send to Adnams for the crops we have harvested so far.

Our business is a great way for us to learn our maths. It’s a great ‘reason’ for learning estimation, multiplication, division, percentages, ratios and much, much more. It makes us ‘think on our feet’ developing our mental maths skills in problem solving. A part of our maths challenge this year will be to keep a running total of all of our produce for this year. Up to June the business 'Vegetablesrus' has already made an impressive £50 which will eventually be spent of upgrading the garden further throughout 2017 and beyond. Well done team!

 

 

 

 

 

Thursday 29^th June 2017

Spread sheets and book keeping

 

After all the excitement of seeing our news report on Monday…today we settled down to learn how to use Microsoft Spread sheets to keep a track of the money we were making.

Working in teams, the pupils familiarised themselves with how the programme works. We are hoping that this will help to make our  ‘book keeping’ so much easier and manageable.

By the end of the session we discovered that we had already made £66.10 from our crops so far!

We quickly worked out that by using our spread sheets to keep a track of our profits, we would soon be able to see which crops are worth growing and which crops we maybe should pass on next year.

In terms of helping us to develop our thinking skills….this project is beginning to really take off and here we have the business women and men of the future learning key ICT and maths skills!

 

Thursday 22^th June 2017

Look East

Wow! What am amazing day we have had! Siobhan called us a few days ago to say that our local, TV news station ‘Look East’, would be coming to film our garden and interview us about our business. We were going to be on the local 6:30pm news!!

What a busy day it turned out to be. We learned lots about news reports and how they were filmed. All we see on the TV is a few minutes of reporting. In reality it took over an hour to produce a 5 minute TV slot! Lots of takes and retakes for the presenter and camera man.

We met the look East news reporter Kim Riley who interviewed a lot of the pupils about their experiences in setting up their ‘Food for Thought’ business. There was only one cameraman…but he had to carry around some heavy looking equipment for most of the afternoon...including a quick dash inside with it all as a storm broke above us!

Before the rain came we managed a bumper harvest. Siobhan was able to take 2.7kg of potatoes, 2.7kg of rainbow chard, 2.5kg of rhubarb and 2kg of perpetual onions to 'The Plough' in Wangford where the film crew would follow its preparation to the restaurant plate!

Next week we will calculate our proceeds so far by learning how to use a spreadsheet and begin to think about invoicing Adnams for our sold items of fruit and vegetables so far!



Preparing our harvest for the big day!

Preparing our latest harvest for 'The plough' at Wangford.

Filming the tomatoes with Kim Riley in the poly-tunnel!

 

It takes A LOT of 'takes' to make a news report!



 

Kim Riley interviewing Siobhan and the pupils about their business.

 



Filming the 'crop weighing' process. A great focus for our maths!



 

Weighing the onion crop in the classroom.

 





Our latest crops all ready to deliver to 'The Plough'.

 

Kim Riley asked us lots of questions. We let him know how proud we all our of our hard work to build our garden and grow our business: 'Vegetables R us'!