We are having a great time at our two new schools St. Mary’s and Hermitage Park.  At St. Mary’s we have a fantastic team of the Tuesday Garden Club who are looking after the garden at the school.  We have planted onions, garlic, broad beans, cabbages and some winter greens in the raised beds.  We are also setting up a wormery in the garden to create some great soil improver and to make use of some of the fruit and vegetable waste from their snack time.  We are also growing loads of food at our allotment with the after school club.  We have had a brilliant harvest so far this year with beans, courgettes, spinach, cauliflower, beetroots, carrots and potatoes.

At Hermitage Park we are contributing to their re-development of the playground and will be building more raised beds and growing space to improve the opportunities for the children.  We are working with the P3 classes and so far we have planted lots of herbs around the playground and sowed lots of wild flower seeds, broad beans, spinach, garlic and onions.  We will also be putting in some fruit trees and fruit bushes during the winter.

Last term for the first time we ran an after-school gardening club on the allotment at St Mary’s Primary school.  The children met every week until 4.15 and grew loads of different food and made lots of crafty things including a very fine scarecrow!  The club will be back next term and is open to any child P3 and above from St. Mary’s and Hermitage Park.

Please get in touch with Elly on elly@cropsinpots.org or 0131 6038827 if you are interested.

We have been having fun over the last few months harvesting lots of food from St Mary’s.  Here are some pictures of the children collecting all the food.

 

Look out for us at the Christmas Fair selling some of our vegetables and talking about our work.  We will be selling salad bags like this one….

We have set up a worm bin at in the garden near the raised beds.  The uneaten fruit from snack is collected by our fantastic carboneers and given to the worms every day.  The worms will turn it into amazing compost for the garden for next year.  So far, since the beginning of October, this has reduced the schools carbon footprint by nearly 290kg of Co2 emissions.  This is the same amount of pollution that is released by someone taking  a flight from Edinburgh to Paris and back!

  

This week our young gardeners were given nature detective cards and sent out into the wilderness (:-)) of Leith Community Croft.  They were asked to find bendy, round, alive, huge, and interesting things….finding flowers, fruits and vegetables and learning a little about seed harvesting too! Mariana our fabulous volunteer had lots of fun showing the boys their mini podcasts.  The children loved the croft and enjoyed discovering what was growing in the middle of Leith.

    

A corner of the playground was planted up by the P 6’s this afternoon, with lots of digging, special care and attention and a lot of smiles.  Together, the group planted an apple tree, pear tree, honey berries, blueberries, raspberries and re-homed a large mature rosemary bush.  A fantastic new fruit garden which will provide the children with a free organic buffet for years to come! Well done Junior Carboneers.