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.

Saving energy at school

I've been supporting 3 primary schools to save energy during Eco Schools' Energy Saving Fortnight based on previous work I've done. St John's made the biggest saving, using 7% less than the previous two weeks.

They had children carrying out daily inspections and awarding points for classes where energy wasn't being wasted. Points were displayed on the Health Schools board every day with the overall results also being presented.

They will probably carry on with this and would save around £1000 a year if they could shave the same amount off their whole energy bill. Once it gets up and running this type of monitoring system is very easy and cost free to maintain. Pupils are also taking these messages home so there is also a wider impact on the community.

Manchester City Council's Energy Management Unit were really helpful in providing data.

Tetrapak wallets

We've cut back some of the gardening work at St John's and been doing some other projects with an environmental theme, an eco club and an energy saving competition.

Here's a purse made from a fruit juice container. These are really easy to do. You'll need scissors, a stapler, a hole punch, elastic bands and that's it. There are some good instructions here. 

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.

Bean hair and bean moustaches

It was time to pull down the runner beans at Armitage as we want to save some of the beans for planting next year and we don't want them to get frost damage. The Gardening Club found there are more uses for beans than I realised.

We picked most of the beans quite young but left a few pods to dry out so the beans inside get nice and hard. We'll store these over the winter. You can also cook them like you would any dried bean.

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!

It's a carrot!

One bad thing about the cold, wet summer meant that lots of things we planted at St John's were not ready to harvest before the summer holiday.

One good thing about the cold, wet summer was crops that we planted in the spring were well watered over the summer holiday and were just waiting there for us when everybody got back to school.

These little carrots are an Italian variety (Franchi seeds) and grew very well in a relatively shallow container. Yes, they really are carrots.