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.

Mr Goulden's apple and Mrs Pickering's potatoes

Armitage has tried composting before but we're trying again using the bays constructed by pupils. Mr Goulden's apple core was the first thing in the staff room compost caddy and we're now getting a steady flow of tea bags and fruit skins.The caddy itself is a container from the kitchen that would have gone to landfill had we not reused it.

Year 3 pupils are emptying the caddy once a week along with their own classroom caddy.

These caddies are great and are providing a good supply of "greens" (the moist fresh ingredients needed to make good compost) but just using fruit and tea will not give us a good balance so it's great that Mrs Pickering (Catering Manager) is adding left over veg, salad and egg shells. This week we even had a bag of potatoes that had gone past their use by date.

To balance the "greens" we need "browns", dry material to soak up some of the moisture and create air pockets to help the worms and micro organisms can do their stuff. That's easy, newspaper and cardboard are perfect and our bays are behind the school bins so every time we add some greens we try to put in the same amount of browns.

Compost corner

After the insect hotel, we've branched out now at Armitage into making compost bays from old pallets.  To get to this point took just over an hour working with two pupils who had a great time learning to use a saw, hammer, sandpaper as well as discussing what compost is and how we can make it.

We're planning to line it with chicken wire to give it more stability and keep the compost in, then it'll need some kind of front section. We'll start adding material to one bin for the rest of the year and then move to the other side next year. Around March/April, the first lot should be ready to use.

Next step will be to set up a composting group who'll gather fruit, veg, tea bags and so on.  If you're going to compost at school make sure you add an equal amount of torn up cardboard, newspaper or shredded paper every time you add to the pile. Simply piling on uneaten fruit will give you a fruit fly infested slime. 

We may start to use it in teaching next week with Year 6 doing something on micro-organisms in Science.

All the leaves are brown

Well, brown, gold, yellow, red...

But what to do with them all?  Simple. Gather them up, put them in a bag or compost bin and leave them. After a year you'll have reasonable mulch and soil improver.  After two years you'll have a beautiful crumbly mixture.  At Armitage it took us just one lunch and break to fill two big bins.  Pupils loved it, especially jumping in the bag to flatten them down.  

Nice learning opportunities about trees and seasons too.