Hello my name is Vicky and I teach the children how to look after our school garden. Together, we grow all of our vegetable and flowers from seed, using our polytunnel to enable us to grow from February onwards. We grow a variety of vegetables including, tomatoes in all different colours, courgettes, peas (a real favourite with the children eaten straight from the pod), carrots, and lots lots more!
Last year we developed a nectar bar to encourage beneficial insects into the garden and this year we are adding plants that are attract different types of birds. Every class composts every week using our home made compost bins and every child loves to water from our recycled water butts.
Be sure to check this page for updates!
Look how our garden has grown
Garden Updates July
Garden Updates May
Look what we found in the garden today...
Spring has sprung!
Garden updates...
Leaves Everywhere
Our produce grown fresh from the school garden for harvest
Nov in The Garden
One Potato Two Potato
Juicy Fruity!
Around the Garden
Several pictures from around the Garden
Topic afternoon
Time Lapse of the Garden
Everyone Helping to Plant Seeds in the Garden
Planting Seeds Indoors with Green & Sapphire
Orange Class Joining In With The Digging & Turning
Opal Class Helping To Build The Liquid Fertiliser
Sapphire Class Planting Seedlings
Trying Different Herbs with Gold Class
Cleaning the Garden Path with Pearl Class
Planting Seeds with Red Class
Poly Tunnel Cleaning Up Progress
Come Back For Weekly Updates
We work together here at Richmond Hill School
The School Garden Covered in Snow
From the sale of our school made chutney and pickled onions, we raised £65.85. This money will be used to buy wheelbarrows for the garden area.
The main ingredients for the chutney and onions were grown in our school garden and the children, with the help of Vicky, made them into something new which was good to eat.
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The Garden and learning...
Every child uses the garden every week. In the winter months our activities can be classed based - for example, planting seeds, making fat balls with seeds to feed the birds, making mini gardens, potting on seeds, and making herb bags. But as soon as we can get outside we will be using wheelbarrows to move compost onto our beds, and planting up all of the growing areas.
The garden also provides produce for the kitchen, we have made rattatouille and an apple crumble for the whole school, and salad is provided at lunchtimes through the warmer months.
Not only does gardening incorporate lots of aspects of the science curriculum, we try to link the gardening activities to the topics as well. For example, for years 1 & 2's topic 'Over the Rainbow' (which explores different colours), for their 'purple week' we harvested purple potatoes!!!
The children really enjoy growing 'odd' fruits and vegetables and so far we have grown some...
- round carrots
- yellow courgettes
- blue and purple potatoes
- black pumpkins
- yellow peas
Some produce never makes it into class, the children love popping the pods to eat the peas! Our strawberries and raspberries (both red and yellow) are always eaten straight from the plants!
In the Summer term we hold our annual garden open day where the children run a market stall to sell produce from the garden, as well as home baked cakes and juice we make from foraged elder flowers. This is a great fundraising opportunity, so far we have raised money to buy a wormery, two wheelbarrows and some brooms!
Keep checking the website for our 'Summer garden open day 2014'!!!