School Garden

Garden 2021

Planting our potatoes

The first thing we have planted this year was our new potatoes (39 plants in total). We have been chitting them around school for nearly 8 weeks! This means we have been keeping the potatoes in a cool, light place to encourage 'chits' to grow.

We have learnt to plant the potato 6 inches in the ground and 30 centimetres from the nearest plant, whilst making sure the chits are facing up. Although, we do recognise that everyone will do this slightly differently. As the plant grows, we will need to keep covering it with soil to protect it and encourage it to grow more- this also stops the potatoes from spoiling.

Planting our Onions

After the potatoes, we planted onion bulbs in the ground. We learnt that it is okay to plant some vegetables this early because they will be protected from the late spring frosts in the soil. 

Protecting our Garden

The new garden has attracted lots of curious wildlife to the area. There are two cute and fluffy visitors to the garden but unfortunately, they have taken a particular interest in diffing up our onion bulbs! Can you identify the animal pictured below?

To protect our seeds and bulbs from the squirrels we have decided to net over the beds so they can no longer dig where they want to. This is what the beds look like now until the vegetables have grown a bit bigger- sorry squirrels.

Planting our lettuces

Rowan class have been busy planting 76 lettuces in one of our vegetable beds! They planted four rows of 19 lettuces. There will be three different types of lettuces ready for the summer: Mixed oriental salad, lollo rosso and iceberg lettuce. When the windy weather passes, we will put the pvc tunnel back so the lettuces can grow in a warm environment and be protected from the occasional cold nights.

Designing Our Garden

We identified an area, central to our school, which was perfect for a vegetable garden: South facing, accessible and a large area. This area was previously our 'peace garden' and needed updating. 

We wanted our garden to be accessible to all of our current and future pupils, so we incorporated a slabbed area with the vision to have raised beds on it enabling wheelchair access (the blue area marked on the blueprint). You can also see on our blueprint that we wanted 4 large vegetable beds.

We are very grateful to have had a successful application from Blaby District Council’s Community Grants Scheme which enabled us to fund this project. We have been working in partnership with Sapcote Garden Centre, who have been exceptionally generous and supportive of of this project. We are grateful for Andrew's support, advice and commitment   

Below you can see a slideshow of the progress made in the garden. It is amazing how quickly a space can be transformed! We are excited to see what we can grow this year!