Future Gardeners

Dear Gardeners,

During the sweltering heat last week (34°C here), I needed to water a lot, even to help new plantings survive. I watered the small polytunnel cucumber plants both morning and afternoon, just a little each time. They have come through it and look amazing.

Now this week it's the opposite and we are short of sunshine! But it's always hard to be sure how much rain will actually fall. Some watering is beneficial, if you can. Any vegetables close to harvest will give more food if you can apply a decent amount of water. Currently, that's peas, broad beans, potatoes, fennel, kohlrabi, cabbage, broccoli, salad and beetroot, plus carrots, but less so. The vegetable needing the most water is celery, at all stages of its growth. 

It’s definitely been t-shirt weather – the photo of me is with Joe Lampl from the USA, who brought a tour group of 33 gardeners with him. Joe and I share the same outlook on no dig growing and it was a pleasure to meet him in person, having known him only virtually for 10 years. 

My new t-shirt range is now available and we have lovely children’s designs – see below for details of a competition to win one.

I’m grateful to Hannah Bates for her piece in this month’s newsletter. Hannah writes about her experience of setting up a no dig garden at a school in Surrey. It sounds as though the headteacher is beautifully forward thinking and values the connection to nature for her students. We all need that, and sadly it's not available to many children. My son Edward is teaching in a London school in Wembley, and he has been struck by the changed attitude among 14-year-old boys who are difficult in the classroom but transform to a calm nature outside in the garden he's creating.

As always, if you would like us to feature your school or community garden in our newsletter and inspire others to grow with children, please email Nicola at [email protected].

Happy gardening,

Charles

Time to get creative! Create some artwork of your favourite summer vegetable. This could be a drawing, a painting, a collage, a model… whatever inspires you 😊

There will be three age categories: 3–5 yrs / 6–9 yrs / 10–12 yrs.

Please send your entries to [email protected] and remember to include your name and age on your entry. Charles will then judge the winners! 🏆

The competition closes at 5pm BST on 8^th June – we will contact the winners by email and announce them in next month’s newsletter.

Good luck!

Greetings from The Winston Churchill School - a secondary school in Woking, Surrey!

Having worked at a social and therapeutic garden for seven years, I was employed to work two days a week to start a therapeutic garden on site. I was really excited by the prospect. Alternative curriculum has become much more widely accepted in recent years but it felt refreshing that this school wanted to bring alternative curriculum on site. Not only does it save on transport costs but means the provision can be tailored to the school and students who attend it can still feel like part of the community.  Importantly - the entire student and staff body can benefit in so many ways. 

I am blessed to have been employed by a headteacher who will stop at nothing to give her students the best opportunities. She was incredibly enthusiastic that the school should have an allotment and that student empowerment, self esteem, wellbeing and opportunity take priority over the pressure of qualifications. 

The brief was to work with students who need respite from a full-time timetable for a myriad of reasons such as school avoidance, ADHD, Autism, or just because they might excel at learning in a more practical way. 

We decided to create an allotment but also a wildlife garden in another area of the school and to make general improvements wherever opportunities arose. I was given free reign over this little corner of the field which I had chosen because of its potential to feel secluded and its sunny position. Hooray! Except… there was no water, no shed and no entrance to the field near by…

I started in April and we made four no dig beds. But any grower will remember it didn’t rain for months and months last spring/summer. Lots of people thought that not digging was a very strange idea which I enjoyed!

We used an empty outbuilding on the other side of the field for a shed. Students set up a waterbutt that we found which collected (of course) no rain at all. The next challenge was fixing a broken tap on the opposite corner of the field which we did but now just needed to get teenagers on board with the idea of lugging watering cans in wheelbarrows about 250m across the field. Reader - it’s a hard sell. Obviously we have plans to harvest more rainwater but it will require time and some engineering. One step at a time. 

I hadn’t reckoned with what the soil of a school field could be like… years of compaction, winter waterlogging, and goodness knows what weed control might have been used in the past but we laid our cardboard and our compost and waited for the rain. And when we returned from the school summer holidays in September the cardboard hadn’t even begun to break down! Now we are a year in and had such a wet winter thankfully that has now happened. But the soil is still quite hard and poor but the worms seem much more numerous than before. Plants are surviving but not thriving in a way I’m used to so more organic matter is still required. We’ve not been helped by another drought in the last four to five weeks here in Surrey!

The other thing I also hadn’t realised was just how cheeky the wildlife would be! We have planted seven rhubarbs and only one remains, and we have planted a whole bed of strawberries twice but still only five remain. Every Tuesday when I come back to work the foxes (I think) have dug everything up! So we have had to invest in a little more crop protection, and we have set about creating some log piles, soil piles, and verges which we don’t mow in the hopes that the wildlife will balance out and the crows and foxes will forage in a few more places.

In other areas of the school we have had some wonderful moments. The entrance to the school looks glorious this spring after students planted 400 daffodils and a pond was renovated and already we have found frogs and newts around. Every school should have a pond. It really has been so transformative for students - even those who you wouldn’t expect - the newts have been particularly spellbinding. The two highlights of my year have been when students, who you might not suspect would care, litter picked around the daffodils without prompt and when one student warned other students to be careful with their football around “my daffodils”.

I work with 26 students across two days and I’d say that working with wood is just as popular as horticulture related activities but every student has their own preferences. For some, seed sowing has been really exciting and a great opportunity to socialise with peers at the same time. Some students love to test their strength and some just love to construct things. I’ve had to expand my own horizons which has been really nice; we made some arches out of overcrowded seedling trees. We’ve made a mini tool shed and bird boxes also out of mostly pallet wood. My hope is that once students see the fruits of their labour over this summer and autumn then there might be increased enthusiasm for growing. One thing is for certain though - students really thrive outdoors even when they are teenagers who seem disenchanted with learning. The University of Derby recently did a study indicating that the Nature Connectedness Index begins to drop in secondary school and bottoms out around 15-16 years old which makes this project absolutely crucial! It’s easy to forget outdoor learning with teenagers; there is so much offering for the primary years. I’m so in awe of The Papillon Project for putting this on the map and inspiring so many!

REF: https://www.derby.ac.uk/news/2019/new-study-pinpoints-when-teenagers-fall-out-of-love-with-nature-/

I’d also like to thank The Future Gardeners Forum for providing me with so much inspiration. Without this network I’d feel very alone.

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, 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