January 2019

Review of 2018 Growing Season

 

What a busy year it was in the garden! The year started with the challenge from ‘The Beast from the East’. It took quite a while for the soil to warm up and allow us to plant our crops. Then followed ‘The great drought of 2019’…another set of challenges as we tried to make sure our plants had enough water to grow. It did make us think how ‘climate change’ might alter the way we look after our garden.

Another goodbye in 2018 was to the allotment. We had thoroughly enjoyed our time there and had turned it into a good growing space. However we decided that it was time to focus our energies and resources on our own school plot…working together to create new growing areas and a greenhouse.

2018 proved to be another highly successful year for the ‘Vegetables R Us’ team. Altogether we made £283.96 profit and the new team we have in place worked wonderfully together….quickly taking on their new roles and responsibilities within the team.

Now the growing season has ended and we look towards the future and how best to spend our profits on growing our business still further!

 

Tuesday 17^th July 2018

A Bumper Harvest!

 

This year has seen our ‘Veggies R Us’ project continue to flourish. With plenty of planting on the school site, today was the day to harvest our produce and ship them to ‘The Plough’ at Wangford. We also had a surprise visitor with Siobhan coming into school to see how we were getting on!

As you can see…we have a bumper harvest of Gooseberries, Chard, Iceberg Lettuce and Rhubarb. Although the dry weather has diminished our crop a little, we have still managed to provide ‘The Plough’ with 4 harvests of our crops.

Harvesting has been a challenge with the weather set so dry and warm. The team have to quickly harvest their crops, weight them, wrap them all and deliver them all in the space of an hour. Quite a challenge but ‘Team Veggies R Us’ have risen well to it! Our finance team are now used to preparing invoices and sending them to Adnams for payment.

Looking ahead we are hoping to buy our long awaited greenhouse over the winter to enable us to grow tomatoes and cucumbers. We are also putting systems in place to make our allotment plot more manageable…lots of thinking required to tackle a changing climate! Let’s hope for some night-time showers soon!

 

 

Monday 4^th June 2018

On Monday, our School Pupil Parliament found out that Holton, Edgar Sewter, Ilketshall St Lawrence and some other schools from Ipswich were interested in our school allotment so we invited them to our school. When we got up to the allotment through the long grassy paths we planted some miniature carrots.

Back at school we showed them how to harvest and send crops off to Adnams. Some of the crops were; Rhubarb, Chard and Red Lettuces. We then showed them how to make an invoice and how to send it off to Adnams to make sure we got paid.

By Harry Kett

 

 

 

 

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!

Thursday 29^th March 2018

Update!

 

Well it has been a busy few months building our business team as the cold weather has settled over our garden beds. During the winter we have worked on marketing and finding out which crops we should focus on growing for this coming season.

For the entire autumn term we have used lots of mathematical and literacy skills in creating reports, posters, data sheets and writing persuasive letters to companies who may be able to support us this coming year.

Operation ‘Greenhouse’ is also in full flight. We decided that after the loss of our poly tunnel in the winter gales that we would replace it with a polycarbonate greenhouse. Using our scientific skills we did a study of sunlight and investigated the rotation of the Earth to find the sunniest (and safest!) spot possible on our school field. The new greenhouse will be sited near to the Poets chair. We are hoping to buy it using some of our profits…watch this space!

Today we started work on the allotment. It had been a good few months since our last visit and although still chilly, we decided that the temperatures were now high enough for the weeds to start to grow!

As part of our handing over of the allotment to class 3, class 4 showed the pupils in class 3 how to identify different types of weeds and how best to deal with them! We used to science to achieve this, investigating tap roots and surface roots and how to deal with each. We also looked at different types of grasses and how they can impact on the allotment if not dealt with properly.

By the end of the session much of the allotment had been cleared and laid ready for the first crops to be set there in April.

Hopefully this year we will be able to grow lots of fruit and vegetables that we can use in school DT sessions to cook with and preserve throughout the year ahead. Food for thought!!

 

 

Tuesday 12^th December 2017

Presentations!

 

Last week we were busy putting all of our crop yield data together and learned how to present our data in tables, pie charts and bar charts. We then had to analyse our data to discover which crops had been a success and which crops maybe we shouldn’t grow again next year. Today we were to present our data to Siobhan from Adnams.

A big part of our business is managing public relations. We have a small team of pupils who are in charge of this so their task today was to work with the accounts manager to email ‘The Plough’ at Wangford and find out which crops they have been the most impressed with this year, which crops they would like to see us grow again and which crops we might not grow this year.

Siobhan was very impressed with or data. Back in July she ran a few sessions for the pupils on ‘presenting’ and ‘public relations’ so it was wonderful to see all the teams looking so confident and presenting their data with such precision.

By the end of the session we had taken questions from Siobhan and the growing team had kept notes so that next term, when we have heard back from ‘The Plough’ we can write a ‘growing plan’ for 2018.

It’s been a wonderfully productive year. We have exceeded our targets and made almost £800 having grown 157.05kg of crops! An incredible second year as ‘Vegetables R Us’ and the learning just goes on and on!!

 

Tuesday 28^th November 2017

Every cloud has a silver lining!

 

Sometimes things happen that test us and sometimes you just have to find a silver lining in every cloud!

This morning we came to school after a dark and stormy night to discover that our wonderful poly-tunnel was wedged in our school sycamore tree.

With lots of hard work by the adults we managed to remove the poly tunnel from the tree…but as we worked to take the framework apart, we noticed that most of the bars had been bent or indeed broken beyond repair so sadly the poly-tunnel was no more!

Siobhan has often taught us about ‘resilience’ during her sessions with us…so that’s exactly what we practised! After a whole business meeting we decided that we would write some persuasive letters to local businesses who have been so generous in their support of our venture.

When analysing our crops we had decided that the tomato crop hadn’t been as good as it should have been. Similar was said of the cucumbers. After lots of discussion where we thought about the science of growing cucumbers and tomatoes, we decided that the location of the poly-tunnel (under a large tree) just wasn’t giving our crops enough light to grow and ripen. Also the growing team noted that the green cover didn’t let much light through. After some research they found that poly carbonate greenhouses let more light through and as they are not made of glass…are safe for our school grounds.

So there we are…our silver lining! Hopefully with the wonderful support of our local business community, we can put up a poly carbonate poly tunnel in a much brighter location and grow a much larger and healthier crop of tomatoes and cucumbers next year!!!!