Gardening Club

Please scroll down to see our progress. We currently have the Level 4 Gardening Award!

Our gardening club has been running Gardening Club since Summer 2019.  

We have joined the Royal Horticultural Society Campaign for School Gardening and are incredibly proud that we have already achieved Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 and Level 4. Our application for Level 5 is being reviewed.

For our Level 1 we had to write about our intent and what we wished to achieve through running Gardening Club.  We stated that we wished to utilise members of the local community , volunteers and our fabulous children to develop, nurture and sustain a beautiful garden for our children.  We want this to be a sustainable, long term program that will be enjoyed for many years to come.

For our Level 2 award we needed to show that the children were able to use tools to grow new plants and vegetables.  We achieved the award because we:
• planted vegetables, fruit, seeds, bulbs and flowers
• created an environment for insects

We prepared the soil, weeded the area (rakes, trowels and forks); sowed and planted various seeds and bulbs using our gloved hands, trowels and forks; sourced free willow canes, planted them and had a thoroughly amazing time! It’s been a very rewarding experience to see how engaged, enthusiastic and proud they are when the bulbs and seeds have started to germinate.

Miss Marlow has big plans to achieve the Level 3 award!  By forging links with our local community, Bolton's Men in Sheds are creating a Bug Hotel for us.  This mini project will bring more wildlife into our school grounds creating more biodiversity and increasing the pollination of our plants and flowers.  Our Gardening Club will run in Spring 2 and Summer 2 to enable us to facilitate this project.  

If you have any of the following items or objects at home, Gardening Club will readily accept them to create a welcoming and homely habitat for mini beasts and creepy crawlies:

• Plant pots of any size, not plastic
• Hosepipe
• Larger pottery pipes
• Old, wooden Pallets
• Chicken wire or wire mesh
• Wooden off cuts
• Logs
• Garden canes
• Fir cones
• Bricks / air bricks
• Old roofing tiles
• Slate tiles

For Level 3 we had to tell the RHS why we decided to undertake encouraging more wildlife into our school garden. 

By utilising members of the local community (Bolton Men in Sheds) who built for us a beautiful Bug Hotel; volunteers who collected recyclable materials for filling our bug hotel and our fabulous children to develop, nurture and sustain the hotel we were attracting lots of different mini beasts onto our grounds.

The children learned about:
what to fill the bug hotel with - twigs, sticks, wool, leaves etc and why;
where to locate it so that it maximizes the amount of insects into our grounds;
why insects are so important to us and
how to work as a team in sourcing the materials from our school ground and placing them into the structure.

We also:
• planted a variety of vegetables, fruit, seeds, bulbs and flowers
• created an environment for insects

The children have learned about the importance of insects in our grounds: how they pollinate the flowers, plants and vegetables. The bug hotel will act as a channel for mini beasts from the surrounding park to travel into our school grounds to pollinate our plants.

We prepared the soil, weeded the area (rakes, trowels and forks); sowed and planted various seeds and bulbs using our gloved hands, trowels and forks; sourced free willow canes, planted them and had a thoroughly amazing time! It’s been a very rewarding experience to see how engaged, enthusiastic and proud they are when the bulbs and seeds have started to germinate.

For our Level 4 award we held a cookery session using our own school grown rainbow chard. 

We linked this with our Design Technology project and added our school grown rainbow chard to our flatbreads. Children designed their flatbreads before making them, researched ingredients and tasted lots of new flavours. As well as rainbow chard on our flatbreads we complimented them with a variety of other ingredients: sundried tomatoes, garlic and olives. 

The children worked as part of a team, sharing ideas and weighing out ingredients. Children also learnt the importance of washing our school grown produce before adding this to our flatbreads. 

For this award we designated a group leader. Our group leader helped to share his experience growing the rainbow chard and how he watched it grow from when it was planted last year. Children were excited to meet a new ingredient and showed an eagerness to add this to their flatbreads!