Some of the lettuces that we planted are ready to be eaten now in the sensory garden, we are waiting for our potatoes to be harvested and then we can make lettuce soup.

The scarecrow got a bit battered last week in the windy weather but is still standing.  We are having a competiton this week to guess the name of the scarecrow, the prize is a bag of garden club goodies!

We have spotted lots of insects in the bug hotel which is quite exciting.

Everyone’s sunflowers are growing really well, just now or so we have been told!  Hope there is no cheating going on!  Miss Russel and Primary 7 were doing really well but during the May holiday it got a bit hot in the sun and isn’t looking quite so good.  The garden club are going to look after it for the holidays and give it a bit of tlc and see if we can help it to grow a bit more.  Mrs Adams the deputy head is very keen to win the competiton and Miss Russel did wonder if she had sabotaged P7’s plant, she said she is innocent, but her sunflower is doing really well!  We will find out who the winners are after the summer holidays.

When we won the sensory garden competition Plants4life arranged for us to recieve some free gardening equipement.  This was a very nice idea but we don’t actually have a garden and most of the equipement was adult sized equipement so took big to use in our containers.  Heather thought it would be a nice idea to see if Garnethill community council wanted the equipement to use either in the park or for local residents to borrow it from the local community centre.  Poppy and Rosie’s Dad is on the community council and thinks it is a great idea and he is going to talk about it at the next community council meeting.  Meanwhile Janie Steel a resident of Garnethill and Mum of Neil who was in the garden club last year is going to keep the gardening equipement in her flat for anyone in the area to borrow.  She said “This is a great idea and people will be able to do a lot more work in their gardens with the right tools”.

yesterday we had our Garden Club Open Afternoon.  It was all very exciting, some of us came into school early and did some baking, we made lots of honey cakes and some lavender biscuits using Meryem’s Mums recipe.

After lunch Heather came to get us and we set up the stalls for the open afternoon.  We had a plant stall, a stall for planting seeds with a demonstration by Livia and Aisha, a cake stall and a competition to guess the name of the scarecrow.  (Nobody has guessed the name so far, so we are going to make it a competition for the whole school).  Our first visitors were Sonny’s dad, his uncle and his gran, as it got closer to home time at 3 o’clock it got much busier. Between 2 and 3 Sannah, Eli and Meryem gave guided tours to Primary 1a and 1b who were particularly interested in the water butt!

After 3 o’clock Miss Douglas who teaches Primary 1b went out into the street and started to encourage people to come in and have a look around.  We even had a couple from New York who were very impressed with all the hard work that the children had done.  Two ladies from Germany also came in to have a look around and were very sorry that they couldn’t buy any plants to take home on the plane.  By four o’clock all the cakes had been sold even Heather’s courgette cake!

Just after four o’clock, Matthias, Holly, Emma, Martha, Kate and Talitha arrived from their secondary school.  They were in the original garden club and had come back to see the plaque that the Garden Club had won for reaching Level 5 of the RHS Gardening for Schools campaign.  They had done most of the hard work to achieve this level and wanted to be back to see the plaque.

Unfortunately Ms Bustard from RHS Botanic Gardens in Glasgow was unable to present the plaque so Miss Douglas stepped in to do the honors, wearing her home made Princess Beatrice wedding hat!  We have put the plaque at the front of the garden so that parents,pupils and members of the public can see how well the garden club has done.

www.flickr.com//photos/46854390@N02/show/

It was a lovely sunny day yesterday so Primary 1a with their teacher Mrs Aktar decided to visit the school garden.  At first the children were very excited but once they got used to being in the garden they had a proper look at things and asked lots of very intersting questions.  Joseph wanted to know why the scarecrow had been put next to the bird feeder.  This is a very good question, the reason is that Chris Collins the Blue Peter gardener put it there when he made our sensory garden.  Lots of  people have noticed this and wondered about it, someone suggested it was to scare away the big birds such as pigeons and seagulls, so the little birds can come to the garden!.

Primary 1a enjoyed their visit so much that Mrs Aktar has decided that they should come out and visit it at least once a week.

We are still hoping to get new plant pots for the playground but the people that are going to provide us with new pots that work for accountants Price Cooper Waterhouse can’t make it until 16th June.

Meanwhile as we have lots of vegetables that we have grown and our prize from Rocket Gardens we have decided to plant them in the playground.

Daniel, Charlotte and Eva (who is on the Eco Committee) helped Heather to put the vegetable plants in the pots in the playground.  We planted them with some lovely red petunias just to add a dash of colour.

It was the hottest day of the year when we planted them, but we gave them lots of water and it will probably rain this weekend!

Primary 5 a and b are studying woodlands and plant life this term.  Heather from the garden club has shown them how to plant beans and courgettes. We tried to grow pumpkins and squashes but there is not much happening with them yet.  Some of the beans and courgettes (and some tomatoes that Sonny in Primary 6 has grown at home with his Dad) are ready to be planted outside.  Today Oliver, Bonnie and Jenna went outside to plant the beans, courgettes and tomatoes in the raised bed that we got with our Morrisons vouchers.  After endless rain it is suppossed to warm and sunny for the next few days so hopefully the vegetables will grow well before the summer holidays.

Primary 2 have enjoyed growing their wheat so much that they have written a poem about it.  Click on the words wheat hunt to read their lovely poem.

wheat-hunt

Primary 2 enjoyed growing potatoes so much that their teacher Mrs Thompson sent away to Bake your Lawn for some seeds to grow wheat.  The plan is to grow enough wheat to make a loaf of bread.  It was a bit tricky to start with as the pigeons wanted the seeds but Heather put some purple netting over the seeds and that did the trick.  We hope that we will have enough wheat to make a loaf of bread when we come back to school after the summer holidays.

Last week we had an Eco Committee meeting with Mrs Simpson and Heather.  The Eco members that are in  the garden club gave us a tour of the garden area and showed us the things that they planted with the Blue Peter gardener.  Then we went back into school and Heather showed us how to plant a bean seed.  Mrs Simpson gave us a diary to draw pictures of the bean as it grows, which is very exciting.

We are very excited because we are in the local Glasgow newspaper The Evening Times.  This is because we won the sensory garden competition and Chris Collins the Blue Peter gardener came to our school to build a sensory garden.  We have now written about his visit and sent some photos to Blue Peter as we would all like to get a green Blue Peter badge.  Fingers crossed that we are lucky enough to get 14 badges!

http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/garnetbank-garden-makes-good-sense-for-city-school-1.1100575

Sumaiyaa in Primary 3/4 is growing an alphabet arc.  We planted seeds in 26 pots, one for each letter of the alphabet.  The seeds match the letter of the alphabet, some letters were a bit tricky.  We have jolly sunflower seeds for j and unbelievably pretty flowers for u.

Now that the seeds have grown we have planted them up into bigger plants and we are going to put them out in the playground when it gets a bit warmer.

We have been very busy this week as the Blue Peter gardener Chris Collins came to our school.  The garden club won a competition to have a sensory garden that we had designed be made up into a garden by Chris Collins.  It was all very exciting and we got to do lots of planting with Chris who was very nice and funny.  We also had our photo taken and we are hoping that it will be printed in the newspapers soon.  Some of the Primary 2’s who are growing potatoes were also in the photo which was nice and Sonny’s wee sister Joy who is coming to school after the summer holidays.  After all that excitement we will get back to looking after our potatoes next week!

For once it is very warm and sunny in Scotland!  This is great for growing but it does mean we have to water our plants a lot!  We also have a lot of long weekends in April which is also great but again a bit worrying that our potato plants will dry out.  Rosa in Primary 2 and I had a great time on Wednesday we had a lovely time working on together on her reading project and then we watered the potaotes.

Today Primary 6 decided it was time to plant their potatoes.  We planted up two bags.  Sonny, Thomas and Meryem planted their potatoes in a black bag.  Sonny decided to use one chitted shoot, as that is how his Dad grows potatoes.  Eli, Ajjima and Sanah planted a green bag with potaotes with more than one chitted bit on them.  We shall see who has the most potatoes.  The competition is definatly hotting up now!

We came back to school after the holidays and were very excited to see what had happened to our potatoes.  Heather also told us that we were the school of the week on this website which was also very exciting.  Heather took us out to the garden club area to get our photos taken and also to look at the potatoes.  Primary 2’s potatoes have grown the most.  Mrs Thompson their teacher will be very excited to see them when she comes in tomorrow.

One bag of Primary 7’s potatoes have grown a wee bit but the other bag hasn’t grown at all.

Primary 6 decided to wait till after the holidays to plant their potatoes to give them a chance to chit a bit more, they will plant their potatoes on Thursday.

Tom’s Report

You’ve got to open the compost and the compost in a plant pot.  Make a hole, put the potato in the hole.  But before you do that you’ve got to chit them, that means you’ve got to leave them on a windowsill for 2 weeks.  That is how you grow your potato.

Haythem’s Report.

We planted them in the soil, then we watered them.

Sophia’s Report

First open the compost, then find a pot and put it in.  Next put in the potatoes.  Third water your potatoes.  That’s how to plant potatoes.

Today we went into the garden and planted our potatoes.  We put compost into a bag then we placed the potaotes onto the compost, we had to make sure we didnt knock the rooty bits or we wouldnt have any potaotes.  Then we covered the potatoes with more compost.  It is going to rain tomorrow so we didnt need to water the potatoes.

Last week Heather who runs the garden club brought in some potatoes.  They were seed potatoes and she told us that we were going to chit the potatoes in egg boxes.  This means that that we can then plant the potatoes in bags to grow more potatoes to eat before the summer holidays.  Maryem didn’t like the seed potatoes because she thought they looked like they had spiders on them.

Mrs Thompson’s class which is Primary 2 is also growing potaotes and we are going to have a competition to see who can grow the most potatoes.