22nd November - Selling our produce

On Friday we took the jams and pickles that we have been making with fruit and vegetables from our garden and had a stall at the Cobalt Business Park.

We decorated the tops of the jars with different coloured pieces of tissue paper so we could easily tell what was in each jar.  We also took the planters that the RHS gardening group made and the Christmas stars made from sticks from our garden.

Our produce sold very well and we came away with over £130.  We will have a meeting on the 28th of November with our Gardeners to decide what we should spend out profits on.

Making Christmas Stars

Today we had a go at making Christmas stars, using some twigs and sticks we found in the garden, we found the idea on the RHS facebook page:

https://en-gb.facebook.com/rhsschoolgardening

We cut or snapped twigs into roughly equal lengths and then arranged them in a star shape.

We attached them together with rubber bands and then wound jute over the top.

Here we are winding jute over the rubber bands and making a loop to hang them up.

Here are the finished articles

What's Growing?

Japanese onions

Comfrey is now all dead and has been cut back for next year.

Winter peas - not much to see yet.

We also took delivery of 25 oak saplings, which we will plant soon.

20th November - RHS Garden Christmas Crafts

 We are waiting for our new pond liner to arrive so that we can continue with the work on our pond, so this morning our students and Sarah worked on making some fantastic things for Christmas out of logs, branches and some greenery.

Learning some new skills - 

Using a clamp to hold one of the twigs still while it is sawed to the right length.

Drilling holes in a log for the legs.

Practical Numeracy Skills and a bit of teamwork - 

Measuring and marking the right place for the legs.

Bit of wood glue to hold everything in place.

 Here we go - Christmas Reindeer with Holly Antlers!

 Sarah and the students also made some Santa's using logs cut on an angle, which they then painted with some acrylic paint.

13th November - working with the RHS on the pond

Today we started to fit the sides onto the pond.  Here is one of our students fixing some decking boards onto the up-right posts which were concreted in a few weeks ago.  Clamps were used to keep the boards in place while the boards were fastened on.

A spirit level was used to make sure the boards were straight and level.

We had Mr Card our Design Technology teacher to give us some expert help this morning.

Fastening some of the lower boards.

The pond is taking shape, we can start to see what it is going to look like.

We have put the pump back inside the pond so it will be ready for use when the pond is finished.

This is where we have got to today, Sarah is going to bring a pond liner next week and we will use some turf to fill in the small gaps underneath the wooden boards.

Making fresh pasta and salsa

Today one of my students showed me how to make some fresh pasta with our own eggs from the hens.  He had learnt how to make pasta in his Technology lesson and was keen to share the recipe.

275g pasta flour

3 eggs

We kneaded the dough until it looked like this.

The pasta was put through the pasta machine, starting with the thickest setting.

The setting was gradually reduced until the pasta was smooth and thin.

We cut the pasta into squares and filled some with our own sun-dried tomatoes, and the rest with cheese.

Here are the sun-dried tomato 'ravioli'

Here is the cheese 'ravioli'

We cooked the pasta in a pan of boiling water until it was tender, we poured a little olive oil on top before everyone had a taste.

Here are a few of our shallots we pulled out of the veggie bed in the late summer.

We chopped about 3 shallots finely, with one of our chilies - think it was a scotch bonnet?  We added two diced tomatoes and a handful of chopped mint, and a couple of splashes of lemon juice - mixed it up and ate it with some poppadoms.

Our Crowdfunding project is now live!

We have joined the campaign with many other schools nationwide to start planting fruit trees in our schools.  The campaign is being promoted by River Cottage, and we would love to expand our small orchard by getting 5 more trees from Otter Farm. If you would like to pledge some money towards our project, please have a look at our project by clicking on the link below.

http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/southlands-school/

Planting our new herb bed

We got a load of topsoil and manure delivered to school this week, luckily we have plenty of helping hands to get it moved out of the school car park!

Sadly it is time to cut back our lovely wildflower bed, we have saved a lot of seed, some to sell and some to save for next year.  We cut down the flowers and dug up the roots to compost.

We then topped up the raised bed with some topsoil and manure to get the soil in good condition for next year.

We have filled up the new raised beds with top soil and have put a layer of leaf mulch in, which will hopefully rot down over the winter and condition the soil for next year.

We put our new herb plants on top of the raised bed to decide where to put each variety.  We talked about why the mint needed to be planted inside a large pot, as it spreads and tends to take over the whole bed.

Planting the herbs in the soil - and the finished bed.  Hopefully it will provide us with lots of fresh herbs for our cooking next year.

The other part of the new raised bed is going to be for bulbs and spring flowers.  We used crocus bulbs to spell out EPICC, hopefully this will work and the flowers will spell this out in the spring?

We planted a selection of other bulbs, daffodils, tulips, and more crocuses and then covered them up with more topsoil.

Here are some narcissus we planted a few weeks ago, they are flowered now and smell beautiful.  We have shared our lovely flowers with the rest of the school.