Children's gardening club - any ideas?

[midnightexpress]

Hi MN gardeners - I want to pick your horticultural brains. We're hoping to start a small gardening club at the DC's school and I was wondering if anyone has any experience of this or any bright ideas for activities, beyond the old planting sunflowers and painting bird boxes. We have a small garden area at the school already, which will need the usual maintenance. We're not yet sure how we're going to organise things age-wise - possibly different sessions for younger and older children so any idea gratefully received.

BTW, we're in Scotland, so will be limited to some extent by the climate, for obvious reasons!

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Oh I like the tyres idea - I am always hopeless at bothering to earth them up so that would be a good way to encourage me to do it! Schools here finish towards the end of June so not sure what would be ready by then - my broad beans have only started coming in the last few weeks, though I did plant them late. I guess if I can find some early strawberries then that would just about work. Maybe gooseberries - they're quite early aren't they? And perhaps rhubarb for the winter.
I quite fancied doing pumpkins - the garden is quite sheltered, but it's also West Scotland so maybe too wet. I wonder if they'd be all right fending for themselves for the hols?

have a compost bin (you've probably already got one), seeing how things decay is very interesting

We have a lovely gardening lady who helps in our school nurture group, we've made vegetable soup from the garden, redcurrant icecream, our own crisps, dyed stuff with veg dyes.

We have one of those cheapo plastic greenhouses from Argos to put seedlings in iniatially, then plant them out

You could make scarecrows. Weeding with a little trowel and a pot always goes down well

Pumpkins are great and should be fine over the summer hols as long as they get a bit of sun as well as tons of rain. Google giant pumpkin to see how to grow mahoosive ones.

GardenOrganic and the RHS do schemes for school gardens - should be on their websites.

You could have a worm composter, which is really fun.

We harvested our own wheat and took it to a local mill to make flour to make bread!

Oh yes a wormery's a great idea! Are they OK if we get a bad winter like last year? I guess we might be able to bring it indoors if so.

Love love love the wheat idea too. I love the Edible Schoolyard site - have you seen it? So inspiring. They not only grew their own wheat, but fixed up their own mill powered by a bicycle - ground the wheat into flour, made pizzas, and cooked them in their wood fired oven in the garden. Oh to be in sunny California!

Love the dyes idea too. And scarecrows. Oh lots of lovely things! I've got a meeting with the Head teacher next week so lots of great ideas to take along now. Thanks everyone.

I'll take a look at the RHS site too - I'm actually a member, so might be able to make the excuse to go on a few garden visits, strictly in the name of research.

Iirc, with our wormery, we did put it under a bikeshed or the like for winter so as not to freeze the bollocks off the worms.