Kolemorgan

Potatoes and Tiddlers

One of my favourite times of the week is working with the tiddlies at a nursery school. They are so open and accepting of what we do in the garden and gloriously thrilled by flowers to see and things to smell. We always plant potatoes, with limited success. Most times we do a potato session the children  focus very hard on what the eyes are and making sure they get covered up to sleep.

After the first year of no harvest, when the children dug the potatoes up almost weekly and sometimes daily to check on them I learnt a valuable lesson about working with this age group. After they’ve gone indoors muddy and happy I dig most of the chitted potatoes up again and hide them somewhere else in the garden. It’s so important to have tiddlies get used to putting their hands in the dirt but equally important to hide anything you actually want to grow.

A potato on some soil