Tuesday 14^th November 2017

After lots of number crunching we finally analysed our growing results today.

We had some really surprising results. It turned out that a lot of our high income crops were actually from established plants like trees and bushes. The Apples were a great seller as were the plums and medlars (can you find out what they are?!)…all in our top ten yield/income list.

When we analysed the vegetables we discovered that Rainbow chard was by far our highest earning crop. We then tried to reason why this might be. Possibly the soil is just right for rainbow chard or maybe we just set it somewhere where the pests couldn’t find it. It was also suggested that maybe the weather was just right for growing it this year!

One of our most disappointing crops were the tomatoes. After some thinking we decided that the biggest problem for the poly-tunnel is a lack of sunlight. The class suggested investigating different, more transparent covers but obviously this would be costly. Other suggestions were asking if we could trim the overhanging trees or simply investigating other crops or varieties of tomatoes that grow better in half light. It’s good to think and I’m sure we will come up with a good solution to improve our yield.

The market research group had a busy day trying to find the favourite fruit and veg for all the adults and children in school. It was no surprise that their completed bar charts showed that strawberries were the top choice for the children! The adult tastes at Wenhaston Primary School are a little more refined with Asparagus coming out on top! Food for thought when it comes to planning next year’s crop!!

Table completed by the Finance Team...thanks to Ty, Jessica and Freya

Crop	Rank Ord.er	Total Income
Rainbow Chard	1	£91.50
Desert apples	2	£82
Rhubarb	3	£76.80
Cooking Apples	4	£60.26
Courgette	5	£50.68
Plums	6	£43.13
Lettuce	7	£37.80
Medlar	8	£28
Marrow	9	£18
Tomatoes	10	£15.48
Blackcurrant	11	£10.10
Beetroot	12	£7.50
Gooseberries	13	£6
Cucumber	14	£5.04
	15

Tuesday 31^st October 2017

 

From today a lot of our blogging will be handed over to our team from ‘Vegetables R Us’. Today’s guest bloggers are Alexis and Emily who will talk you though today’s happenings!

 

Today we have been promoting our ‘Vegetables R Us’ business. The class was split into four groups. One group is making a power point presentation to explain our business to Adults while the other three groups are making presentations for class 1, class 2 and class 3.

We hope that our presentations will help us to spread the word about our business as well as teach the younger children how they can join in and help us with our business as one day they will be doing what we are doing now!

Our finance team has been preparing our invoices to ensure we get paid by Adnams. After using lots of maths skills to work out our totals (we had time times the cost per kg by the weight of fruit or veg we had grown!) we discovered that we had made a grand total of £604.10 in 2017.

Some of the money we made is profit…you have to knock off the amount we have spent on poly tunnel covers, wood for raised beds and seeds to work this out. Now we can use the money to improve our garden and business and if there is any leftover we may be able to afford to buy something we can all use at school to improve our environment.

We are very proud of what we have achieved in our first, full growing year!!

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'! 

Tuesday 6^th June 2017

A day to be proud of….we have earned the RHS Level 5 Award!!

Today we announced to the pupils that we have earned the RHS level 5 award. From the beginning of our ‘Food for thought’ project we had been saving photos and evidence to show how our business and garden had grown together.

We quickly worked our way through the first four awards but the fifth award needed a little extra effort to achieve with lots of written evidence and photos to support our case for being awarded the highest of the RHS school awards. We had to prove to the RHS that our gardening was a part of our curriculum and that we had shared our success with the local community as well as with other schools.

Here we are sharing our garden with Kathy Oliver, a member of the Wangford Allotment Association.

Kathy was amazed by our lettuces too!!

Luckily we had help our ‘big dig’ community events and with the help of Adnams we are now helping other schools to develop their own school gardens and ‘food for thought’ businesses.

As a part of the level 5 award we receive £200 worth of ‘National garden centre’ vouchers. We are now going to work out what we need to make our garden EVEN more efficient….and then reward ourselves with a garden centre shopping spree!!

Our RHS Level 5 award being proudly displayed around the garden!