Thursday

With a sharp overnight frost, the day has been glorious!  Clear blue skies all day and I took my chance to actually work outside the polytunnel!  The rockery had been neglected - my gang of girls from Class 7 had started to plant rockery plants, but with various activities elsewhere, they haven't been up and I haven't been there!  We still had plants in their pots, so I gathered a group of boys and we tackled the rockery.

Our main problem is the ground up there is basically rubble and hardcore.  When it was landscaped in the summer, a weed suppressant was put down and covered in top soil which has improved it immensely.  But the top soil only goes down a few centimetres and then we hit the suppressant.  It was time consuming as we needed to cut the suppressant and then dig into the horrible hardcore.  Finally we got all the rockery plants planted up and looking grand.  The boys got a treat of a personal tour of pond and picking out pieces of ice that had formed on the surface.  It was a lovely day and actually reasonably warm, especially when we were digging.

Another job to cross off the list!

Christmas Hyacinths

Yesterday, I took 2 children each from Classes 1, 2 and 3 who helped plant 85 hyacinth bulbs back in October.  Since then, the bulbs have been covered with plastic and hessian sack and kept in the polytunnel, developing their root system and waiting for Christmas.

So tentatively, we pulled back the coverings (I had been periodically checking them, but hadn't been up for over a week). To our delight, most of them had shoots of about 2 - 3 cm and looking healthy.  We also checked on my mini daffodils which I hope to sell in the last week of term.  They're looking good too!

As you can see, we had some slugs in with the hyacinths.  The kids collected them all and rehomed them elsewhere in the garden.  Thankfully, they hadn't eaten the tender shoots, so we took it that they were just hibernating in the damp dark conditions under the sacking and not doing anything else! Phew!

We re-covered the bulbs with just the hessian which lets in light, but not direct sunlight and will keep checking them until the end of the week.  Then, we'll bring them into the classrooms and hopefully, getting our timing right, they will bloom for Christmas. Fingers crossed!

We then did some watering of the geraniums which are wintering in the greenhouse, planted some salad leaves and checked on our broad beans.  There's not much to do at the moment and its quite a bitter wind. Luckily being on a hill, we haven't been affected by the bad flooding, but everything is saturated and very muddy.  So it was just some housekeeping really.

Da-dah! Hyacinths growing!

However, the slugs joined in too!

We found these eggs?  What are they?







The daffodils are looking healthy too



Jaidon re-covering them with hessian sack

In January, we start our new growing season and we have a large box brimming with seed packets.  It all starts after Christmas!

Sorry!

Apologies for not blogging this past week, but I haven't been around.

On Monday I went on a school residential with our Year 5's and did crazy things like hurtling down zip wires and ending up standing atop of 10 milk crates wondering how on earth I got up there!  Way out of my comfort zone - the highest I usually go is 2 rungs up a ladder. The kids just loved it!

So we got back on Wednesday and then I've helping out with our international visitors from Finland, Ireland and Slovakia.

Next week, I hope to get the hyacinths in and hopefully blooming for Christmas! Back next week!

This week so far

Yesterday, we started to count the Morrisons Let's Grow vouchers that we have been collecting for the last few weeks.  I had been peeking in the box, thinking we hadn't got many, until I started to pull them out and it seemed endless!  There were zillions!

So I went off and got some help.  Lucy and Noah spent the afternoon counting them into piles of 50 vouchers with me and the tally came to 2927! Wow!

The next job was to choose some gardening equipment from the catalogue, which seems easy enough.  Lucy and Noah made some executive decisions and I went off to work out how many vouchers it came too.  About an hour later, after a lot of crossings out, adding items, a couple of cups of tea and a two ginger biscuits and a calculator as my brain was fizzing, I finally had a shopping list which left us with 5 vouchers left!  I went on the computer to order and to my surprise, that all went smoothly!  I was quite chuffed with myself.  All sorted and I could cross that off my never ending list!

So when I arrived at school this morning, I found more Morrison vouchers!  Aaargh!  Very kindly, people were still offering me vouchers (the more the merrier), but I had it all sorted!!!  Thankfully, Morrisons give you 48 hours to amend your order, so I've got a definite deadline now and this time tomorrow, I can forget about it again!

Thank you to everyone who collected all those vouchers for us!  It all helps.

Today, my small band of merry men and ladies, helped us clear one of the school paths.  Our school is used as a polling station and the main pathway to the voting room, is adjacent to our garden. It's also where all our compost bins are and where a large heap of manure slowly rots.  Over the months, both compost bins and manure have been overflowing and encroaching the path, as well as several bags of earth left by contractors.  It had been on my list for weeks to tackle, but now we had purpose!  Armed with spades, the kids moved the offending soil back onto the heaps from whence it came, emptied the bags of earth and swept the pathway clear.  We unhooked the hose and put that away and cut back the lavender.  Edie decided to make a posy for her mum with the last of the lavender flower, but she was soon back with Mrs Green in tow to make another posy for Miss Golia for her birthday. What a lovely thought!

Just before half term!

On the Thursday before half term, we did a little bit of housekeeping in the garden before the holidays.  We checked our hyacinths and daffodils, did a little bit of tidying and finally pulled out of the polytunnel, the four huge Olympic puppets that were donated to us by Mrs Thorpe in the summer.

Created with bamboo sticks and covered in chicken wire, they looked perfect as climbing frames for our peas and beans next year. They had been lying in a mangled mess on the floor of the polytunnel (they are not the easiest things to manhandle) so I was determined to get them in situ in the actual garden. With help from a group of boys and Mrs Whitwam, we managed to prop them up with the aid of some old fence sticks and left them at jaunty angles.

Unfortunately, we have had some high winds recently and our temporary fixings have given way, leaving our puppets in their own mangled mess again.  Ooops. However, I have sort of delegated the job of getting the puppets back into an upright position to Mr Maldonado and Class 7, under the guise of Design and Technology and problem solving!  Mr M seemed to relish the challenge and so hopefully, they will appear tomorrow and figure out how to keep these huge, ungainly and unmanageable puppets permanently stood to attention!  When they were up (albeit briefly) they looked the ticket and were a quirky addition to the garden, so I am keen to see them fixed properly!  No pressure Class 7!

Bulb planting in Holt Park

It was a bit of a rush to organise, but Mrs Colefax, Mrs Whitwam and I managed to gather 11 children together and meet Alan and Cathy of the Holt Park Tenants Association for a spot of bulb planting.

We walked down to the Holt Park Entrance, where we worked with Groundworks this time last year to redevelop a area of overgrown wasteland into a wildlife area. Today, Alan and Cathy wanted us to plant more daffodils, specifically around the bench, along the pathways and next to a residents house who had lost a little bit of the grassy area to the new path.  As the adults dug the holes, we had our work cut out as the children raced us to plant and cover the bulbs!  I was soon discarding several layers of clothing!

Next, we walked through the estate to the other side, opposite Ralph Thoresby High School and planted the remainder of the bulbs on the grass verges there.  It was perfect timing for us to walk back to school and in time for home!

Working at the Holt Park Entrance

The Team

Alan and Taylor

Rebecca patting down the grass

Izzy with her bulbs

Outside Ralph Thoresby High School

Srosh and Mrs Colefax going for the same hole!

How many does it take to plant a bulb?