Holt Park Entrance Project Opening Ceremony - Friday 27th April

The children with Greg Mulholland MP, Alan Mann and other dignitaries  at the Opening

Greg Mulholland MP and Alan Mann cutting the ribbon

Five very proud children

Having been invited to the Opening Ceremony by Alan Mann of the Holt Park Residents Association, Miss Morgan, Tareq, Robbie, Sana, Roshni, Lama, Chelsea and I wandered down the road to meet up with everyone.  The day was beautiful, with the sun shining for the first time in days and we were actually peeling off our coats.  We had a good look round - our bulb planting had come to fruitition with daffodils showing, the superb metalwork sculptures created by Chris Campbell, but designed by Class 9 were in place.  Lama was particularly taken with her fish design. We discovered our names on the plaque on the wall for everybody to see and we admired the Holt Park design too.  Greg Mulholland MP arrived to cut the ribbon with Alan Mann, watched by local residents, the police, members of Groundworks and the Tenants Association and other people who made the whole project possible.  The children were delighted to be mentioned in Mr Mulholland's speech and receiving a round of applause and later, gathered around for official photos.  Of course, my camera played up but I managed to get the important ones. The children were wonderful, chatting to people about the work they had done.  We then wandered up to the Holt Park Leisure Centre for refreshments until it was time to go home.  It was a lovely afternoon and I would like to thank Alan for inviting us to be part of the project and hope to work with the Tenant's Association again in the future.

More Rain!

Thursday.  With big black clouds threatening from all sides, I took some children out to the garden.  Mrs W was feeling unwell today and hadn't been in, but I decided to take the children out.   I choose five children who I knew would work well and hard.  Jacob spent the afternoon weeding the vegetable beds and a fantastic job he did too! Ali and Melissa helped with sowing more seeds in trays and transferring plants to bigger pots.  Josh and Jordan started planting out some strawberry plants in our strawberry bed (hope it stops raining by June!) and later Reece joined us.  It all ended up with us weeding the beds as the big black clouds still hung in the distance, so we made the most of the lull in the weather.

At 2.45, the heavens opened yet again.  We had just put all the tools away and sorting ourselves out, when we realised there was rhubarb to be picked! It was as we started this activity, that the downpour occured.  The children picked quite a bit and put it in the wheelbarrow as I intended to sell it to the parents.  They took some stalks themselves and headed back into school, a bit grubby, a tad damp, but very happy.

I was going to wheelbarrow the rhubarb down to our main playground, but only got as far as Reception class. It was here, that I sold several bags of rhubarb to parents and some members of staff.  It was well worth standing in the rain for.  There is still tons of rhubarb in the garden, so there could be more sales next week!

It's raining again!

It has not stopped raining this week and we have not been able to get out into the garden properly.  We ended up in the polytunnel, sowing yet more seeds!  We asked four Y5 and Y6 children to help us out and we really worked hard for a good hour and half.  It was really nice to sit in the polytunnel with the rain lashing down and the wind rattling the plastic, but still able to garden.

On Tuesday, I attended a Pond Maintenance course at the Yorkshire Showground which was very interesting and now I'm full of ideas.  Our pond is a little neglected, but once we've got the fencing done and some platforms put in, we can concentrate on the plants and attracting wildlife.  At the moment, we have a few creatures, mainly water louse, which is an indicator that the water isn't particularly healthy, but at least we have something!  I'm looking forward to seeing damselfly larvae, cadisfly and newts!

On Friday (tomorrow) we are attending the Holt Park Entrance Project Opening Ceremony which we have been involved in.  We are taking the children down to the site to watch Greg Mulholland MP cut the ribbon before heading to the Leisure Centre for refreshments. The weather forecast is looking good, in the sense its not raining! More later in the week.

It's stopped raining!!!!

Yes! It stopped raining long enough for us to get out into the garden - though the heavens opened at 3pm and drenched everybody at going home time!

The sun actually popped out from behind the somewhat menacing clouds and shone on us with quite a bit of warmth.  We split the children up between sowing seeds and some pond dipping which they loved.

With our pond due for a revamp, Mrs Whitley and I had a bit of a poke into the murky depths and were pleasantly surprised to see water creatures swimming!  So at lunchtime, I headed home and grabbed one of our seaside fishing nets and in the afternoon, we supervised the children with a spot of pond dipping.  The children were fascinated and with a quickly printed off identification sheet, the children discovered that we had snails, water lice and small worms in our pond.  Our poor pond never got quite finished, a job too big for Mrs Whitley and I, and too expensive to remedy with contractors.  Filling up with unsightly pond weed and wind blown rubbish, we wondered how we could solve our problem.  Then, Interserve, the contractors for the new Holt Park Well Being Centre stepped forward and have offered to sort out our pond and wildlife area, free of charge!  We can't thank them enough and are hoping to see them in our garden in the next couple of weeks!  In the meantime, we will invest in proper trays and pond dipping nets and then will be able to to do the job properly!  Anyway, it was lovely to have a dummy run with the children and remedy any issues that we might have!  We just can't wait.

Our diligent watering of the Easter holidays (thank you Mrs W for bearing the brunt of the watering rota) saw our seedlings germinate and grow steadily, though our up and down weather isn't helping. When the sun is out, it's very warm and springlike, but we have suffered some quite sharp frosts and even snow over the last couple of weeks.  With the polytunnel unheated, our poor seedlings haven't had the best of starts, but we are doing well.

We welcomed Rachel Morgan on to our team this Friday.  She came to the Wednesday afternoon adult garden  session and offered to help out with our children's rota. Rachel was brilliant and it felt that she had been with us for ages - she was so comfortable.  We haven't scared her off and she's kindly offered her services every Friday which is a great help as I sometimes can be asked to help out in other parts of the school having to cry off the gardening and leave Mrs W on her own.  Hopefully, we will be able to expand on the adults and have a little dedicated team helping with the children.  If you would like to help out, you know who to call...........!

Next Friday, we are all off to the Holt Park Entrance Project Opening Ceremony.  With seven children who live on the estate, we have been re-developing a little plot of land after being invited by the Holt Park Resident's Association to partake. Our little team, better known as the Holt Park Seven, listed the animals who might live there, noted the different type of trees and spent a very rainy, windy and ultimately muddy afternoon planting bulbs of snowdrops and bluebells!  It say we were got wet is a bit of an understatement! Class 9 worked with Chris Campbell, a community artist and developed some metal work animals that are now on display on the site and now it is ready for its official opening next Friday. So we will be walking down from school to watch the cutting of the ribbon by our local MP, Greg Mulholland before having refreshments at the Leisure Centre.  I will fill you in with more details this time next week! 

We're back!

The weather has been appalling this week!  It has rained almost constantly since we got back to school after the break and not particularly warm either. A small blessing that it wasn't this bad when we were on our holidays!  I can't help chuckling that as soon as we talk about hosepipe bans, the heavens open!  Just typical.

The planting is coming on a treat and tomorrow we are in the garden all day! We are still in the thick of it with sowing seeds, but its very rewarding.  Mrs Whitley and I have a new helper, Rachel who is a parent of one of our pupils and who would like to get involved.  She came to our inaugural Wednesday Afternoon Parent Garden session yesterday, which wasn't very well attended.  With the rain pouring down, we presume people thought it had been called off. We are hoping for more people next week.

So if you would like to join the adult gardening group, here are the details:

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOONS

1.15 - 2.45

COOKRIDGE PRIMARY SCHOOL'S GARDEN

Everyone welcome

Job? Whatever needs doing at the time!!

Garden Update

If you are wondering why we haven't posted for the last two weeks, it's because of our two week Easter holiday break from school.  Mrs Whitley and I have been looking after our seedlings and watering them, though  it's gone distinctly wintery again after two week's of 70 degree heat.  Last week we had snow! Crazy weather at the moment!

So back to normal next week, with the children back to school, so we'll be back busy posting what we get up to in the garden! Watch this Space!