Future Gardeners

Dear Gardeners,

It feels autumnal now at Homeacres and we are doing the final plantings and sowings of the year. Now is an excellent time to plant garlic outside, and under cover as well. I find there is significantly less rust from growing garlic under cover. 

You can also sow broad beans until about 10th November, for an early harvest next June. At this time of year I also like to sow peas for shoots under cover, often in mushroom boxes or small pots on my otherwise-empty greenhouse bench. Pinch out the tops when they get to about 7 cm and add them to a salad for a lovely flavour. They will then shoot again and make multiple stems, for two to three months of harvest.

No Dig Day is just round the corner on Tuesday 3^rd November. I hope you have plans to celebrate. We will be having a big team lunch here with everyone bringing a food dish; it’s one of the year’s highlights at Homeacres. Do please enter our two competitions, details below. If you would like to share what you get up to on social media, it’s #nodigday.

This month we have Dusk Eastman returning to give us an update on the Castle Kids’ Patch which has gone from strength to strength. The children who attend her gardening clubs are lucky to have such an enthusiastic teacher.

As always, if you have a story you would like to tell us about your gardening project, please email in to Nicola at [email protected].

Happy gardening,

Charles

Hello Future Gardeners!

I am back again to update you all on Castle Kids’ Patch, a year after our last article. We have had such a fantastic year and I am thrilled to be able to boast about it. When I last wrote we had just set up Castle Kids’ Patch and become a CIC, our after-school gardening clubs had begun and were proving to be very popular. I wrote a lot about becoming a CIC which took a lot of admin and time. Now we are finishing up our second summer season at The Patch and it has been the year I could never have expected.

To start with, late last year we applied for National Lottery Community Funding and we were unbelievably grateful to hear we were successful in our application. This funding has allowed us to continue to run the project by supplying a much needed wage to our Patch Co-Ordinator, and therefore enabled us to give our after-school clubs free of charge for the families in our community. The pressure this took off of us to keep the project running is unmatched, and I urge everyone in a similar position to give NLCF a go. It also funded some practical things like a new composting bin system, refreshments for our weekly Garden & Chat mornings and some perennial raised beds. It was such a fantastic feeling to be acknowledged by The National Lottery Community fund as a project that was worth investing in; it moved us from a little community project to something bigger and more worthwhile, both in our own eyes and in the eyes of our community.

Our clubs have been fully booked since the start but demand went up threefold once the funding came into place and we offered them for free! We are having to look into more ways to include the local children to meet the demand which is exciting and a little intimidating. I am just so glad there are that many children and families who are keen and invested enough to ask to be added to a waiting list, it proves that gardening with children is the future.

In May we were blown away to be asked to create a pop-up children's garden at The Royal Bath & West Show. In just 4 weeks we pulled together every resource, plant and tiny watering can we could and trundled off down to the showground, and lo and behold, we won GOLD! After recovering from the shock we realised that as a project this meant such huge things, amongst all the other gardening companies and projects our little children’s garden was recognised and celebrated. I also met Adam Frost at the show who wholeheartedly supported our project and was so kind and complimentary of it, it was fantastic to have his support.

Landing straight back to reality we came back to The Patch to continue our ever-popular after-school clubs and started up a new venture in Baby & Toddler club. I did have a few doubters as to whether an allotment was the right space for this age group but they were well and truly proved wrong once the parents and kids started attending. The two and three-year-olds pottered about the plot watering plants, picking and smelling herbs and generally having a fantastic time. The tiny babies sat and played with a big tub of water filled with herbs, edible flowers and toys - quietly noticing every bird in the sky - and the mothers and fathers breathed a fresh-air-based sigh of relief, drank a cup of tea and chatted. It has turned out to be the most relaxing and sweet part of my week.

At Summer Holiday clubs this year we had local experts come to each club and teach the children something new, from print-making with a local artist to beekeeping with our local beekeeper, natural fabric dyeing with our local plant dye expert and cooking with fresh produce with a fantastic local nutritionist. Not only has this taken the pressure off a tough gardening year (we all know how dry it has been), it has also given us an opportunity to connect with more people in our village and expand the connection with the local community, another thing I definitely recommend if you have a gardening club that needs more ideas.

All in all it's been a fantastic second summer and I cannot wait to see what next year has to offer. It has been such a privilege to watch the kids grow a year older with gardening as a normal part of their weekly life. I have accidentally stumbled upon the best job in the whole world.

It’s a day to celebrate this wonderful way of growing food, and your own garden space and community. 

We encourage you to enter our children’s competition, Create No Dig. Create the words ‘no dig’ in your garden using leaves, flowers, sticks, stones vegetables or whatever you can find. Then photograph your creation and send it in to Nicola at [email protected].

The winner will receive a cash prize of £100! Second prize is £50 and third prize is £25. Each winner will also receive a 2027 sowing calendar. We also welcome entries from children’s school or community gardens.

This competition is open to children up to the age of 16. Winners will be announced on 4^th November, 2026.

For adults, there will be a caption competition launched across Charles’s social media and on YouTube. The funniest caption wins. The photo will also be uploaded to the No Dig Day page on Charles’s website.

Whatever you do on the day, have some fun in your garden!

Would you like to share your experience of growing and gardening with children?

However large or small your project, we would love to hear from you.

We hope that by showing what’s possible, others will be encouraged to get started with their ideas.

Please email Nicola: [email protected]

To help with the planning of a school garden, including the offer of free resources, please see this page of my website.

For a Sowing Timeline in the Northern Hemisphere, please see this page, and for the Southern Hemisphere, please click here.

For starting a new no dig allotment or garden, this is the page.

First Tunnels offer schools a 20% discount. Do see their page here, where they feature the Future Gardeners Forum!

We would like this resource list to grow and turn into a toolkit to help set up and run a successful growing space for children, so if you have any resources you think would be helpful, please email Anna, [email protected]

Below are the contact details for the Future Gardeners Forum speakers, 2024 and 2025. Do follow along with their projects via Instagram or their websites.

Alby Jones, @nodigkid

Beth Rochford, @rootzup

Karen Waterston, @thegardenofideas

Helen Cross, @grow_cook_inspire

Tom Houghton, @thecommunitygrowers_cic, @thebostonmarketgarden

Hannah and Ross, @lettinggrow

Lara Honnor – Skool Beanz 
@skoolbeanz

Jess Creasey – Cornwall Grows CIC 
@cornwallgrows

Phil Brown – Headteacher, Bottesford Junior School 
Website: https://www.bottesfordjuniors.com/school-garden/

Sarah Alun-Jones - GROW
@wearegrow
https://www.wearegrow.org

Dan Romans-Hay – Woody School Farm, Streatham
@woodyschoolfarm
[email protected]

Matt Willer – The Papillon Project
@thepapillonproject
https://www.thepapillonproject.com