Gardening

Growing the Community

That exciting time of the year has come around again. Time to start thinking about sowing those seeds in readiness for another exciting growing year. Last year’s failures can be forgotten with lessons learned and the successes remembered with pride and pleasure.
Just remember don’t take it too seriously, have fun, garden with a smile and let the children do the same. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter if you grow the biggest vegetables, leave that to the showers, we are wanting to encourage taking healthy options both in growing and eating the produce. Let the children have the experience of carrying out every step of the process from preparing the ground, sowing the seeds. Don’t stop at them harvesting the produce, let them take it into the school kitchen and help the cook to prepare it – washing the cabbage, peeling the potatoes, shelling the peas and cutting up the carrots. It’s all about teaching them these important life skills that have up to recently been missing in education for far too long.
Have set evenings where parents, carers or grandparents can come into the school and for example make a wooden herb box together. Let them fill it with soil and sow the seeds, or put in the prepared plants. It is surprising how many families have never done things like this together, especially the mothers, aunties or grandmothers.
This is something for them to then take home at the end of the evening to encourage them to cook and eat healthily and maybe start their own growing project at home.
When the families have finished building and planting their boxes maybe you could have for example some home made soup ready inside the school just to give the evening the perfect ending and send everyone home warm and content. If you have the funding available a good idea is to give each family the recipe and ingredients for the soup to take home.
Sessions like this show families how easy and cheap it is to make a healthy meal instead of phoning for a take away and encourage the healthy option. Now we are into March it is time to start thinking about sowing the seeds. Seeds are the most popular and frequently used method of producing new plants. It is fascinating how many differently sized, shaped and textured seeds there are.
I have a good game that I play with children at schools that I visit and work in. You need ten small bottles or doctor’s sample bottles are ideal. Get a wide range of different seeds for example beans, peas, sweetcorn, beetroot, parsnip, carrot, tomato, onions, cabbage and lettuce. These give you a wide range of the different sizes, textures and shapes.
Carefully open the packets and tip the contents of each packet into each bottle. If you can remember what seeds are which that is ideal but otherwise number the bottles and seed packets accordingly from 1 to 10. Just don’t make the number on the bottle visible to the children. If you can remember the seeds you only need to number the seed packets. Ideally the seed packets can then be laminated to give the game long lasting use.
To play the game you just lay the ten seed packets down with the vegetable picture face up.
Give the children the ten bottles of seeds and see how many seeds they can match up correctly with the picture.
This gives them a great fun way of learning about what the different vegetable seeds look like.
With some vegetables for example peas and beans we actually eat the plant’s seeds. With other vegetables we eat different parts of the plant for example stems, leaves or even roots. Even these plants that we eat different parts of still do produce seeds if they are allowed to but usually they are picked and eaten before they form seeds. When a vegetable plant flowers and forms seeds before it is supposed to we call it bolting.
It can be fun to maybe let a few vegetable plants seed for the children to collect the seeds and try to grow them the following season.
Once collected they need to be dried off to remove all traces of water, this stops the seeds germinating before you want them to. Once dried out they need to be put in packets and labeled for future identification.
A fun thing to do is to let the children design and make their own seed packets. They can then give the different vegetable its own personal school named variety. Just remember to then store the seed packets in a dry place away from any mice who would love to bite into these packets and feast on the seeds.
I have mentioned about seeds being so different in size, shape and texture, but they still have lots of things in common and need roughly the same things to grow well.
The first thing the seeds need to make them start growing is water. This water soaks into the seed softening it and starting the growing process. The first thing that starts to grow is the root of what will become the plant. This is the anchor of the plant that holds it into the ground and takes up the water and nutrients from the soil to help make the plant live and grow. Next will come the stem and then its first leaves. These plants grown from the packet of seeds are called seedlings.
Maybe you could plant some bean seeds in a glass or plastic container or jar so the children can watch the growing process. Put some soil in the container then place the seeds up against the sides. Cover with compost making sure you can still see the seed. Then just watch it grow.
Another good idea is to sow cress seed on kitchen roll as these grow really quickly. The speed at which the seedlings grow depends on how much light and warmth they get.
One thing you need to avoid is the seedlings becoming drawn. This is when the seedlings are all so close together that they put all their energy into growing upwards, naturally fighting against one another for the light. To avoid this you need to prick out or pot up the seedlings. Pricking out is replanting the seedlings at intervals of approximately 2 inch in a seed tray which will probably hold approximately 24 plants, obviously depending on its size.
Potting up is when we put each seedling in its own individual pot. The advantage of doing this is that the roots do not have to again be disturbed before it is planted in its final planting position.
The other thing that the seeds need to grow besides water is heat. Different seeds need different amounts of heat to grow or germinate. Some seeds will be happy sown out into the garden in spring when the soil is starting to warm up. Others need to be sown indoors in the warmth and then transplanted outdoors when the outside temperature and soil temperature is much warmer.
The most important thing to do when you buy your packet of seeds is to carefully read the instructions on the packet. It usually tells you if to sow indoors our outdoors. If to cover with soil once sown and what temperature is needed for them to germinate and most importantly when to sow.
The packet also tells you how many seeds it contains. This can vary greatly from a few seeds in packets of cucumbers and tomatoes to hundreds in carrots and turnips.
Maybe you could make your own paper pots to sow your seeds into. These can be made out of old newspapers that would be thrown away or if you are environmentally friendly recycled.
These paper pots can then be planted straight into the ground when the seedlings are ready and you don’t need to disturb the root system as the paper pot will then naturally rot down and disappear.
Once the seedlings start to grow do not over water. This is a big mistake lots of people make. The seedlings like to be kept damp but hate to be too wet. How much water they need depends on if it is a sunny or dull day, thus how warm it is in the greenhouse or classroom.
Plants grown in the greenhouse will start to develop quickly during April and early May. This is where you become a gardener, getting all of the plants ready to be planted out without them becoming too drawn and straggly.
If you have some cold frames, these are ideal for hardening the plants off and slowly adapting them to the big step from greenhouse life to outside life. Basically a cold frame is a box with a plastic or glass lid on. You can leave the lid off during the day and put it back on when there is a risk of frost at night. What stars the members of Haworth Youth Action Group are. Their treat for doing so much brilliant work in the community was a trip to the pantomime at the Alhambra in Bradford. Instead of just thinking about themselves they said they would like to buddy up with older people who were either house bound, lonely or encountering problems. The afternoon was such a great success and shows we have some brilliant, caring teenagers coming through.
The gardening club at Haworth Primary School received some brilliant news over the Christmas period. We attended The Telegraph and Argus Best of Bradford Awards and came away with The Best Schools Community Project which was sponsored by Hallmark Cards. This award gave everyone at the school such a lift and we all felt so proud and honoured to be recognised by our own City.
The cooker has been busy in the cookery room at Haworth Primary School recently. The children have been busy making buns for the bring and buy sale, that along with the non-uniform day raised a magnificent £473 for the Haiti appeal. Our hearts go out to everyone effected by this terrible disaster.

Gardening in Schools Businesses
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email. the5thorpes@tiscali.co.uk