Thursday 19^th April 2018

Setting our first crops

 

Well the cold weather came and went and on Monday, the sun came out! The temperatures are certainly warm enough to plant our first seedlings of the season.

Unfortunately we still don’t have our greenhouse on site yet so the seedlings have been ‘grown on’ away from school. Next year we hope that the younger pupils can do a lot of the sowing and link it in to their science work on ‘growing plants’.

There was a nice surprise when the class went out to the rear plantation beds today. Our autumn crops had been badly affected by the extremely cold weather but some of them, including; Russian kale, chard and rhubarb chard had thrived in the cold conditions and were ready to harvest! So our first job was to prepare our first crop of the season for harvest and delivery to ‘The Plough’ in Wangford. By the end of the session we had quality controlled, packaged and sent £5.50 worth of vegetables to The Plough!

Our next job was to clear the beds entirely and plant our spring crops. After our winter analysis of the top crops for the best yields we have Italian lettuce and iceberg lettuce to set, both of which should be fast growers and provide us with a quick crop. We just have to watch out for the slugs and snails who are hungry after the long, hard winter!