Huge parsnips

Now I like a good roasted parsnip at Christmas but you can leave them in the ground a bit longer. 

We pulled these beauties out in March, after a titanic struggle. 

Glorious herbs

Herbs are great to grow for many different reasons. They look magnificent, they offer a sensory aspect to the garden with their taste, feel and smell and children can take them home either to eat or to grow their own.

Here at St Chrysostom's we have bay leaves, oregano, mint, chives and sorrel.  Must get some lavender.. oh and sage ...

It's easy to buy a small plant in a garden centre or even supermarket. Just plant them and most are pretty tough and will come back year after year.  They just need a bit of a trim in the late summer.

Producing new plants is easy in most cases. Just slice a piece of root off and plant it.

Sorrel is a children's favourite, they love nibbling the tangy citrus leaves.

Getting parents involved

At Ravensbury we have a session for parents once a week just after they have dropped their children off at school. In a diverse area like this it has been really interesting hearing people's experiences of gardening and growing food in other countries. I've learnt a lot as well as helping people develop new skills and just having a nice time for an hour.

Harvesting winter crops has generated some interesting moments as well. At St Chrysostoms we picked a lot of chard leaves and gave these away to parents. At one point I was with 4 women:from Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan and China, all clamouring for the chard and sharing stories about how they cooked it and grew it back home.

Watch out, they're behind you

We planted sunflowers at St Chrysostom's in the spring. See the post from 14 May about the difficult start these flowers had. When we came back, we found this...

Spring is here!

Half an hour after we planted our sunflowers at St Chrysostom's on the 13th May!

Making your own bed

 

I've been helping a couple of schools to develop new raised beds for the spring. Children have surveyed school grounds, designed the beds and then done most of the construction. It works out much cheaper than buying beds and gets them doing some applied maths.

New year new seeds

The longest day is behind us and the evenings are just starting to get a little bit lighter (honest) and there's nothing like the smell of new (peat free) compost and the rustle of fresh seed packets on a January day.

Children at St Chrysostoms are getting in the swing with contrasting planting. Cress that will be ready in a week and sweet peas that might not flower until June.

Pretty soon though we can start to get a few more things going as February has lots more potential for things like tomatoes, chillies and potato chitting.

Pumpkin time

We finally got round to harvesting our pumpkins at St Chrysostom's.

They were a good option for a school garden, especially with the wet summer keeping them watered!  Children were amazed to see how big they grew and really enjoyed cutting them up today. We'll make some soup, pumpkin chips and maybe some cake with them.

We've also saved the seeds for planting next year and I even managed to sneak in a bit of Numeracy while we were doing that.

Another good thing about the wet summer

The strawberries at St Chrysostom's really seemed to enjoy the wet weather and have matured into magnificent looking plants sending out runners in all directions. We are trying to capitalise on all this growth and pot the runners to create new plants.

If you have never done this before, the idea is to place the roots of the new plants on the runners into relatively small pots, wait until they have established themselves and then separate them from the main plant. They can then be planted out. It can be a little bit fiddly to get the runners to stay in the pot but the idea of more strawberries is a strong motivator!

Stinky Stew

If you thought comfrey tea smelt bad, try nettle tea.  Not nettle tea that you'd buy in the shops, this one's a plant food. We used the nettles that had sprung up over the summer in our raised beds at St Chrysostom's and soaked them in water for a week. Then it was just a matter of decanting it into a bottle. While it's brewing keep it well away from anyone as it really does stink.

You can then dilute this and use it for a plant feed. Put the left over leaves into the compost.

Children called it Stinky Stew but assured me they hadn't named it after me. 

Leaf mould

A year ago we put leaves in plastic bags at St Chrysostom's and we got them out today. They'd rotted down very nicely and we spread them on the raspberries for a nice mulch over the winter. Children really enjoyed seeing how they'd changed.

Really easy to do, just make sure water can get into the bags, making leaf mould is a wet process whereas compost is best kept dry.

Salad Days

Every Monday has been Salad Day at St Chrysostom's. We go out and pick a couple of bowls. One goes onto the school salad bar and the other goes into the staff room to perk up the staff's lunches. When they know it's grown at school a lot of children have been trying the salad although there are some who don't like the ideas of eating something that's been in the soil!

We've grown a variety of lettuces, rocket and oriental leaves such as Mizuna, Mibuna and Osaka Purple. You can easily find packets of mixed seeds and they easily produce a crop during term time. Many are "cut and come again" where you simply take a few leaves and the plant carries on growing. Our best Mizuna grew where someone dropped a handful of seeds and we didn't get round to thinning them out!

How many seeds?

I stole this idea from the bugs.

Well, from BUGS, the Baltimore Urban Gardening with Students project in the USA (http://bugsprogram.blogspot.com/).  You can't see the mess here but the table is covered in kiwi, tomato, apple, lemons and chillies.

It was a nice way to introduce a seed planting session and talk about seed saving from the plants we grow. First, pupils estimate how many seeds are in each piece of fruit and then they cut them up and count the seeds, comparing their estimate to what they actually found. And then you eat everything.

Remember to have children wear gloves if they're handling the chillies and remember to do the same (not like I did resulting in a spicy tasting slice of kiwi at the end of the session).

The Ardwick Avocado

I've started working at St Chrysostom's Primary in Ardwick.  When I asked a group what they'd most like to grow, one boy said "avocados!"

We were gathering ideas so I didn't want to curb his enthusiasm by telling him that we couldn't or that it would be difficult and, besides, something made me think that you could do something with avocado stones.  When I looked it up in my old House Plant Expert book, there it is on page 150: Fun Plants.

Apparently you put the stone in a pot, keep it warm and dark until it germinates and then you can get quite a nice plant (no fruit though). There was also mention of other seeds that might produce a plant including citrus fruits, dates and, crucially, pomegranate because today at St John's one girl said she'd love to grow them. So, we'll have a go and report back.