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Gardening

Find tips and tricks to make your garden or allotment flourish on our Gardening forum.

School gardening club - ideas?

11 replies

heliotrope · 09/01/2012 14:27

Hello,
I'm helping one of the TA's at our primary set up a gardening club, its a city school but they have some raised beds and borders. We have some funding (£250) and the idea is to grow veg mainly that the children can look after and see crops within the school year. We thought peas and radishes and some spuds in potato planters - any other ideas for reliable and compact things to try?
Thanks for any ideas.

OP posts:
WhoKnowsWhereTheTimeGoes · 09/01/2012 14:33

Hello, yes lots of info here! I haven't got time for a long post now but will pop back tonight, we started one at our primary school this time last year and it went really well.

HattiFattner · 09/01/2012 14:39

rhubarb
Strawberries
Raspberries
Peas
Beans - french. runner
Start pumpkins, but obv harvest in Oct
Onions
Garlic
herbs
carrots
courgettes
beetroot
cabbage

I would avoid:
Brocolli
cauliflower
sweetcorn

as these all seem temperamental to me!

Take a look at this for ideas if you have limited space!

Blackpuddingbertha · 09/01/2012 20:17

Try this website. Looks like it could be useful.

WhoKnowsWhereTheTimeGoes · 09/01/2012 21:34

That website does look interesting Blackpudding, I'll have a better look at that later.

Heliotrope we started our club after Feb half term last year. We ran it one lunchtime a week, half an hour with key stage 2 and half an hour with KS1 to fit round their lunchtimes. Up to about 12 children at a time with 3 to 4 adults. We have four raised beds and a variety of containers (old tyres, sacks for potatoes, old plant pots). We kept a diary, which I would highly recommend. We asked for donations of any gardening stuff from parents and were given lots of old seeds and plant pots which got us started. One of our biggest expenses was compost to fill all the containers, but hopefully we shouldn't haveto spend as much this year. A water butt and lots of small cans are very useful, if there aren't enough other jobs to do on any given day children will happily water anything that needs it ad infinitum. We sold our produce at various fundraiers and parents evenings.

As for crops, we planted onions and broad beans at the begiining of March, both were very successful and were both ready to harvest in July. We also planted radishes in March, they were ready to eat in 5 weeks, but it was an exceptionally warm spring, we had a second crop ready to harvest by mid June. Salad leaves planted in March were also a great success. We planted beetroot in May which we were able to harvest in July too, they were very easy to grow. we also grew pumpkins, squashes from seed ready for the Harvest festival in October, and cucumbers and courgettes which were sold in July. Also swewet peas, nasturtiums and french marigolds in between e other crops

Things we won't be doing again are tomatoes - too much watering needed in school holidays, crop in August and ours got blight. Potatoes- maybe a few as the children enjoyed doing them, but we did about 40 sacks of them and didn't top the compost up high enough because we couldn't afford it, they didn't crop well and a lot were exposed to light and went green. Also, so many people grow them that they were hard to sell (also heavy for people to take home, parents would buy a bunch of radishes or bag of lettuce on the spur of the moment but not potatoes). Runner beans- we only grew a few and will do thesame again as they just didn't sell, anyone who likes them tends to grow them at home anyway and they are so prolific no one wanted to buy them.

We took lots of photos and entered our local town in bloom contest and won a gold certificate, so we have a lot to live up to this year.

heliotrope · 10/01/2012 13:32

Wow thanks for your great replies and the links which loko great. I can't believe you actually got crops to sell, that is amazing. Lovely idea to do the flowers in between the crops too. I'm not sure how much space we have yet but will definitely take on board the points about sweetcorn etc and tomatoes not being ideal, but can plant things that will crop in Autumn. I will have to find out whether we can have a water butt as that sounds very good too.

Thanks again! and Good luck for your planting this year

OP posts:
GnomeDePlume · 15/01/2012 17:30

heliotrope - how about looking at growing some plug plants in trays to sell? You could try some simple things like marigolds, sweet peas etc. With the marigolds you can also talk to children about partner planting to keep pests away.

As well as flowers you could grow some veg plants to sell as well such as tomatoes, courgettes. The great things with these is that your children can do the early care then sell them on to others to do the later work.

WynkenBlynkenandNod · 15/01/2012 19:34

Rainbow chard is great for the autumn and looks pretty. Borlotti beans are easy as you can just leave them on plant until after the holidays so they dry and will keep the children busy taking them out of the pod.

Parsnips are easy once you've got them to germinate and leeks could be good. Just so they have something for the winter. I grew Oca and Yacon this year which are tubers. Very low maintenance. Not cheap to buy initially but once you've grown them you can just replant for next year. Might be something you could grow then sell .

Get a load of little seed bags and get the children to collect seed and sell them too.

heliotrope · 18/01/2012 17:49

I love the idea of growing plants to sell, I bet the children would like that. The only problem for us might be lack of light storage places to germinate them - we have a shed but it is quite dark.
Thanks for the tips on chard and beans too, and winter planning. This thread is a goldmine for ideas.
Oca and Yacon - totally new to me!

OP posts:
WhoKnowsWhereTheTimeGoes · 18/01/2012 17:52

We're going to do plants to sell at the summer fair this year. We used windowsills inside the school to germinate a lot of our seeds last year and have two of those small portable greenhouses outside too.

PattiMayor · 18/01/2012 18:04

Selling little plug plants is a really good idea - sweet pea seeds are massive and really easy for little fingers to grow. I grow my seedlings on a windowsill.

Beans are great because the flowers are lovely (as well as the beans) and also very easy to plant.

You can make your own plant pots out of newspaper and a paperclip. Our school gardening lady is very good at it and you can google for instructions.

The other thing worth investing in as well as a water butt is a compost bin. You can get all the veg scraps from lunch and bits of shredded paper to make your own compost in - it's very satisfying. Most councils supply them free or for a very low price. You do need to put it on earth rather than concrete though. My DS loves putting stuff in the bin and seeing all the worms!

Have you also thought about encouraging wildlife? Logs and piles of leaves are good, and you can buy insect houses too.

Good luck - I love our school gardening club :)

spingey · 24/01/2012 16:56

Glad I have seen this. I have been thinking of volenteering at ds's school for a while now and doing some gardening with the children.

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