Class 3 plant Christmas Hyacinths

On Tuesday, the whole of Class 3, one of our Year 2 classes came up to the garden to plant their hyacinth bulbs for Christmas.

They loved it. They filled up their pots with compost, went to Mrs Hallatt to get their bulb and their photo taken and then put more soil around their bulb before covering them all up.  Some children went into our wildlife garden to plant some crocuses and snowdrops and others just had a good look around. We managed to get 30 bulbs planted within the hour!

Mrs Hallatt's photos will be on Class 3 blog.  I had my hands quite full with keeping 30 children moving and couldn't take photos!

On Thursday and Friday, we repeat the process all over again with Class One and Two, so we'll end up with 85 hyacinth bulbs flowering for Christmas (fingers crossed). I have googled the subject several times to make sure that I am doing it right and not to disappoint anyone!  No pressure, then!

Within minutes of Class 3 going back in, Class 7 appeared and after a brief hello, just set off to their jobs. It was lovely.  The sun shone and it was quite warm. There were children all over the garden, working and helping each other.  Even the two special needs children who came up were part of the group and happily digging and looking for worms. We had a little difficulty encouraging the boys to put their worms back into the undergrowth!

I got quite cross when my camera decided to run out of battery - there's no warning at all - just a brief flickering message and then dead.  And it eats batteries!  So I missed some really great photo opportunities today which was quite frustrating, so I went to our office and took a pack of batteries for my garden box! Hopefully, I won't get caught out again!

Today, we were running a bit late, but Mrs Whitwam, Reece and Taylor appeared to help with some rather little jobs. First was to empty the staffroom teabag caddy - we are training the staff to put their teabags in a compost caddy rather than the bin - and it was getting rather full.  Then it was visiting the classrooms with trays of tomatoes on their windowsills to see if there were any red ones.  We collected quite a few and we created two boxes - red tomatoes and green tomatoes and set up our market stall on the playground.  The boys were a little reticent to start shouting "come and buy our lovely tomatoes" so ended up taking the box around to the parents and managed a couple of sales.  Well done, boys.

Today was my first lunchtime Garden Club. The staff have been asked to run a club either at lunchtime or after school.  I was tempted to run an after school club as we could do at least an hour after school, until I realised that we would be gardening in the dark by the end of October!  So over the winter months, we'll do the lunchtime which isn't easy as the children need to eat their lunch (and so do I) which gives us no more than half an hour.  Six children were due to come up, but only three made it for various reasons - we need to iron out a couple of teething problems. So we couldn't really start anything serious, so we cut some lavender and had a good look at the pond. Hopefully it will get better over the next couple of weeks and the children get used to meeting me on time.  But it was fun and more children are getting to the garden, which is the main thing!