October in the Garden

October has been a busy month in the garden - the ducks have got very used to their garden and have been feasting on Kale in the raised beds.

We have discovered that ducks are very messy birds, so to try to keep things a bit tidier a wood chip path has been constructed with a weed barrier to stop the grass and weeds growing through next spring.

The Scholarship students have been planting inside the poly-tunnel.  They spent a long time preparing the soil, digging it over and raking it to break up any lumps of soil.  They have planted a few herbs and some winter cabbages.

This is our new cockerel, he's a Jersey giant.  He's quite young and as yet has not worked out how to give us a proper crow.

We decided to have a vote to see what he should be called.  The students got a bit of a lesson on tally charts too.  As you can see the name Maximus was very popular - so we welcomed Maximum to our little flock of hens.

One of our friends from Shiremoor Allotment Association arranged for a delivery of manure from a local farmer. I think we got about 7 tonnes of manure for an excellent price - unfortunately it has to be delivered into the school car park.  The students have a huge task to move it onto the raised beds.

The huge manure heap - wheelbarrows ready to begin the job of shifting it onto the raised beds.

Filling up the new raised beds in the scholarship garden.

 Each bed has been given a good layer of manure, which should provide good fertiliser for the year ahead.

One of our students asked to make a hedgehog house for the garden.  We looked into what we would need to construct one and found a great plan for making a hedgehog house from a wine crate.  We are lucky enough to have a great local wine shop in Tynemouth called The Wine Chambers

http://www.thewinechambers.co.uk/index.php/home-page

Kindly they donated a lovely wine crate to our project which will be transformed into a home for a hedgehog over the next few weeks.

The globe artichokes are now ready - we picked them and sold them to a member of staff who was very keen to buy them and cook them.  We had great feedback, apparently they were delicious and we need to grow some more next year!

The caretaker arrived at school early one morning to see a fox sat outside the ducks house.  This worried us and using some spare weld mesh we had from when we constructed the hen run was used to reinforce the duck enclosure.

The ducks getting a bit of a clean.  Even though we have a lovely pond, the ducks still need to have access to water when they are shut inside their pen.  

The scholarship students looking at their seedlings and deciding what to transplant.

Our Celeriac, after watching Gardeners World, we learnt that the outer leaves should be removed to give the root a chance to grow.  We will be finding out how this tastes later in the month.

Planting garlic in our raised beds, we always try and plant garlic around this time of year as it needs a cold spell of weather.