Making use of our produce

Whilst some of our crops have struggled with the cool wet summer, others have positively relished the soggy summer!
Turn your back on a courgette plant for a second and before you know it, you have massive marrows. After a week away, I popped in to school to check on the vegetable garden. I was greeted by some rather impressive courgettes/marrows. The more courgettes you pick, the more the plant will crop.

I headed home with a basketful of the big green beauties and set about looking for inspiration of what to make with them. Stuffed marrow is a traditional way of using up a glut of these veggies to create a cheap and filling family meal.

Below is my twist on the traditional recipe using one of my favourite ingredients, Hungarian paprika sausage (similar to cooking chorizo).

In a food processor combine:

1 Paprika sausage or cooking chorizo
3 minced cloves of garlic
1/2 a red sweet pepper
1 slice of bread (great way to use up the crust)
2 medium sized mushrooms
6 sunblush tomatoes
sea salt and freshly cracked pepper
1 red onion

Once the ingredients have been chopped together, stir in an egg.

Slice the marrow into thick rounds and scoop out the flesh. Place the rounds on an oiled baking tray

Stuff the marrow rounds with the mixture and top with dried breadcrumbs.

Bake in an oven preheated to 180c until the marrow has softened an the breadcrumb topping has crisped up.

Serve on a bed of sauteed vegetables. I used baby pak choi and fine asparagus.

RHS Campaign for School Gardening Photo of the Month

A picture of our Olympic flowerbed has been selected as the RHS Campaign for School Gardening website's 'Photo of the Month' for August.

You can view it here: http://apps.rhs.org.uk/schoolgardening/default.aspa

Summer Planting at Fagley Primary

Well, we may have broken up for the school holidays, but it is still all go in the school gardens.

On the last day of term, the Year Six leavers planted an apple tree together as a reminder of their time spent at Fagley Primary. Each child wrote a message on a scroll describing how they felt they had blossomed whilst at Fagley Primary. These were buried with the roots of the apple tree to signify that whilst they have roots at our school, they are growing up and moving on to pastures new.
The following poem accompanied their messages:

As we plant our apple tree,

We take a step on life’s journey.

For success and happiness we strive

Our apple tree will grow and thrive.

As we move on to pastures new,

May our tree grow tall and true.

And when its blossoms bloom in May,

Wish us luck along our way.

When fruit hangs heavy from its boughs,

We will make you proud, as we do now.

To help the tree along its way, the children placed some bone meal around the roots. Unfortunately, this nutritious plant feed seemed to have attracted an unwelcome visitor. On Tuesday, I called in to school to catch up on some weeding and discovered that our tree had been dug up! The hole had been completely emptied of soil and I can only assume that it was the work of a fox in search of the bone meal. I replanted the tree and added a layer of pebbles over the soil to hopefully deter any diggers. I checked on the tree today and there doesn't appear to have been any more attempts to dig it up, so hopefully, the tree will survive its ordeal.

Elsewhere in the school gardens, things are progressing well. The Olympic Rings are looking splendid and would be worthy of a place on the winning podium (after I gave the grass ring a bit of a haircut!).
In the kitchen garden, the lettuces and peas are doing very well, but the brassicas are suffering a bit. The changeable weather caused some bolting and splitting and the snails, slugs and caterpillars are making their presence known. A spot over-zealous carrot thinning by some of the children before the end of term has left some space in one of the vegetable beds, so I will be planting some quick growing salad crops in the space over the next few days.

The fruit border has already yield some tasty blueberries, raspberries and gooseberries, though the weeds are taking some controlling.

One other job to tackle over the holidays will be to add some bark chippings around the base of our fruit trees to prevent the grass from encroaching and starving the trees of nutrients.

Hopefully, we can rely on some more sunshine over the coming weeks to ensure we have a good selection of  ripe produce to chose from come the Bradford Schools Food and Flower Show in September.

Braving the Rain and Snail Racing

We have come to accept that sunny spells will be few and far between this summer, therefore we have chosen to embrace the rain.

Our Year 2 gardeners donned their new Garden Team waterproofs and headed out into the school garden. We are looking ahead for the Bradford Schools Flower and Vegetable Show by collecting flowers to dry over the summer. The children were set the task of identifying the lavender bushes around school and taking some cuttings to dry. They quickly realised that the easiest way to identify lavender was by its wonderfully soothing aroma. Before long, we had managed to collect an impressive bunch.

Next, we inspected the kitchen garden. We noticed that over the weekend, pea pods had begun to form on the pea plants. We also found that our courgette, carrot and lettuce plants seemed to have been enjoying the wet weather.

No visit to the kitchen garden is complete without a spot of strawberry picking. One of the children discovered a huge snail chomping on a strawberry and this set off a chain reaction of snail hunting.

The children found a whole host of snails of different colours and sizes hiding beneath the lid of the cold frame.

The obvious next step was to hold a snail race, so the children duly selected and named their competitors (snail Olympic hopefuls included Dave, Ellie and Tom) and placed them on the starting line on the playground. I am not sure who won and there was definitely more than a little enticement of snails by way of strawberries and carrot tops, but a great deal of fun was had by all.

After popping round to show the rest of the class their snaily sidekicks, the children returned the munching molluscs to the school field. There was just enough time for some obligatory puddle stomping, before returning to class (to wash off the snail poo!)

Bog Babies Spotted at Fagley Primary

As you may be aware, we have a wonderful bog garden at Fagley Primary. Recently, some children from Year 4 and 6 added some lovely new plants to our bog (hemerocallis, astilbe, primula candelabra and ferns). These new additions seem to have attracted a rare a beautiful form of wildlife – Bog Babies.

The children have been set the task of carefully seeking out these new additions to our local fauna and recording their sightings on our school blog: 

  http://bradfordschools.net/blog/fagleyblog/2012/06/28/bog-baby-spotter-record-test-page/

Our Bog Baby hunt has been inspired by the wonderful book written by Jeanne Willis
http://www.jeannewillis.com/BogText1.html

Listen to the first part of the Bog Baby story by clicking on the link: http://audioboo.fm/boos/865698-the-bog-baby

Interesting Solutions for Poorly Draining Sites.

Without wishing to sound like a broken record! Our site has been struggling to cope with the recent downpours. Due to continued urbanisation of many green areas, finding innovative solutions to drainage is becoming a hot topic of discussion.

One solution is to turn a negative into a positive by creative channeling of rainwater. We have all no doubt heard of the benefits of collecting rainwater via guttering and water butts, but what about the play opportunities associated with rainwater?

One of the leading voices in innovative play landscapes is Norweigan playground designer Frode Svane. His vision for rainwater play has been incorporated into a guide produced by Planet Earth Ltd. for London Play in association with Natural England.

http://www.londonplay.org.uk/file/1524.pdf

Below are a few extracts from the guide:

'New requirements to install sustainable drainage systems have been introduced following recent catastrophic flooding events in lower river valleys. We [London Play] want rainfall to stay in the local area and sink into the ground, not be whisked away to flood somewhere downstream, but we also want to make rainfall fun for children to play with.

The guidance has been produced with funding assistance from Natural England, and written by Planet Earth Landscape Architects, with advice from Bob Bray Associates and photos from both of them and from Norwegian playground designer Frode Svane.'
Case Studies


Fort Royal School, Worcester




This is a special school with many different needs. Runoff from the upper car park 
is cleaned through a permeable pavement and released through a rain chain. 
Open rills carry water through a small courtyard and sett channels take water to 
the school green space. A formal pond with a glass window allows pupils to look 
into the pond safely. A habitat pond will allow pond dipping and act as a home for 
wildlife with balance beams over water and access to moving water provide 
further understanding of what happens when it rains.



Planet Earth Ltd, St Mary’s Frobisher Park, Peckham, London

 

Planet Earth have been transforming this declining pocket park into a playful,

magical semi- wooded landscape. Lush woodland planting surrounds a colourful

river channel. The river source starts at the ‘rocky mountain area’ a high point at

the back of the site and flows down along the natural levels into a reedbed in the

river ‘delta’ area. In heavy rainfall children will be able to enjoy chasing rainwater

running along the river channel and through the site. The reedbed has been given

an extra safety precaution to satisfy the local council’s peace of mind using steel

mesh hidden beneath the reeds that is bolted to the surrounding concrete.

Planet Earth Ltd, Argyle School, Camden, London

At Argyle School, Planet Earth designed a ceramic surface water-system that
collected rain water from roofs. Using a hand pump, the children could pump
water into the channels and watch it collect in their very own pond with frogs and
water plants.

Unseasonably wet!

Well the rain just keeps on coming! Here is a snap I took of our bog garden today.
The marsh loving plants are quite happy to spend a day or too with their roots sloshing about in this muddy soup! However it is making it rather difficult to get on with any of our other gardening tasks.

Luckily, we had a break in the weather earlier in the week which gave us the chance to get a few jobs done. Farhan and Rehan helped me to add some coleus to our black Olympic ring and to clean the black grass with milk. We also managed to plant some ferns in the bog garden which had been donated by Mrs. Parfitt. The Year 4 gardeners weeded and watered the vegetable beds, mulched the fruit trees and added an astilbe, a hemerocallis 'corky' and a primula bullesiana to the bog garden.

In the next few weeks (weather permitting) we are hoping to have new wooden edging fitted to the butterfly garden borders and some new composting stations installed. We will also be rotovating and enriching all the planting areas to prepare the soil for the next phase of planting.