schoolgardener | Kolemorgan

The hidden harvest

April 17, 2014 — Kole Morgan

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

Posted in gardeningclass, schoolgardener. Tags: potato. Leave a Comment »

Summary of contents of clubs and classes

January 10, 2014 — Kole Morgan

In both club and class we aim to include the following:

We grow vegetables
We eat vegetables
We grow fruit
We eat fruit
We sow seeds and examine seeds
We create our own plant parts diagram or picture
We thin and transplant seedlings and look at the plant lifecycle
We make paper pots and recycle
We brighten up our space with garden craft
We water and weed and compost and generally look after the outdoor space
We talk individually about our own dream garden and favourite plants
Each week we try a different fruit or vegetable and discuss whether we like it or not
When it rains we find a space inside and write and draw in our garden journals
We do puzzles, wordsearchs, bingo and games based around what we have been learning so far to help clarify our knowledge
We talk individually about our own dream garden and favourite plants and we create a plan for changing the space we have at school into a dream garden