Tag Archives: local preschool

Sowing the Poppies

28 September 2019

I’ve written earlier about how tricky it can be to grow wild flowers, and how we’ve been warned that poppies prefer to grow in newly-disturbed soil – we knew about the ‘disturbed’ bit, but just how often can we produce the ‘newly-disturbed’ area they like? Anyway, we had another go this year, and in line with not digging or forking the soil over (because it destroys the soil structure), we just hoed it after lifting this year’s dead poppies.

Then a couple of weeks ago, the children from the local preschool (Mentmore Road Under-Fives) came round to help us. They raked the soil level again and added leaf mould liberally, then sowed pinches of poppy seed saved from this year’s crop. Then the seed had to be in good contact with the soil – in some situations, this is done by animals trampling the seed in, so the children duly became very obedient cows, and stomped all over the area they’d sown. They thoroughly enjoyed being not only allowed to step on the bare earth, but positively encouraged to do so!

Here they are helping us get the poppies well into the earth

And ten days later, their seeds germinated; there are hundreds of tiny seedlings that you can just see if you know where to look. When the children came round again this week to lift the carrots they’ve been growing, they were able to see how well they’d sown them. And we know we’ll have poppies again in June, as usual.

Gold again for Leighton’s parks and gardens!

10 September 2019

We’ve just heard that Leighton Buzzard and Linslade has retained its Gold award from ‘Anglia In Bloom’ for the fourth year running – great news.

This is great recognition for all the work done over the past year by the In Bloom volunteers, the Town Council staff, and South Beds Friends of the Earth (who look after Linslade Memorial Gardens, and some 18 other wildlife-friendly sites round the town). And ‘Keep the Buzz in Leighton Buzzard’, the campaign run jointly by the Town Council and South Beds Friends of the Earth, was nominated in the Best Conservation Project category – that’s the community gardening equivalent of being nominated for an Oscar! We didn’t win it, but it’s not so much about winning, as about being assessed by experts and found to be doing a great job.

So thanks in particular to everyone who helps us look after Linslade Memorial Gardens – the team of local residents, members of South Beds Friends of the Earth who help in so many ways, the Town Council, who support us in everything we do here, the various organisations and businesses around town who collect leaves for us (to make leaf mould, which improves the soil), the many passers-by who stop to chat and encourage us and thank us, Mentmore Road Under-Fives, whose delight in the place is such a joy. Its great to be assessed as doing well; but mainly, it’s a privilege to be able to make these gardens a peaceful haven for people and wildlife, and, we hope, contribute to being a fitting memorial to those who gave their lives in war.

Harvest Time

08 September 2019

Back in April, the children from our local preschool had a great time planting out some tomato plants, and they’ve enjoyed watering them on subsequent visits. It’s been hard keeping the plants watered over the long, dry summer holidays, but we’ve had enough tomatoes for all the children, including a few for the older children who often come round to see the gardens even though they’ve moved on to school and are no longer involved regularly.

Here are a couple of photos of some of the children harvesting their crop:

It’s really good to see how pleased they are – as gardeners, we just see a poor crop because of the drought, and we make a note to add much more compost and leaf mould this year to try and retain more moisture. But they’re just delighted with the very sweet, tiny tomatoes they’ve grown.

Looking ahead, it’s nearly time to sow the poppies in the bed nearest the car park, and this year we have some very special helpers – watch this space!

Gardening with the children from the local preschool

27 May 2019

We’ve started trying to meet up more often with the children from Mentmore Road Under-Fives, as we all enjoy it and they remember things better after a couple of weeks than after a month! – particularly when they’ve been sowing seeds. This year they sowed peas in pots – getting the multipurpose compost into the pots was all part of the fun – and they’ve been out much more often to water them than we managed last year.

A couple of people who themselves run community gardens have asked for any advice about gardening with very young children. I wouldn’t say we’re experts! But from trial and error, we’ve found that watering is probably the very favourite activity, with digging around in earth or leaf mould a close runner-up.

For watering, we’ve learned a number of things that make it easier and more fun –using child-sized watering cans (ours were a couple of pounds each from the local Homebase) and having fewer cans than the number of children, it’s much easier to keep an eye on the children that way (water travels fast, and soaked feet / t-shirts / other children spoil the event for everyone). We only fill them half full, because that makes turns come round again faster, and there’s less water to be spilled. We’ve found that the newer children, the two- or three-year-olds are pretty good at waiting for just one or two other children to empty their cans before it’s their own turn. A couple of things that make a difference, that we’ve learned over time – 1) if the tap’s quite a way away, bring plenty of water over before the children arrive as it keeps one more adult in the mix for longer – we now take four ten-litre water containers round to the garden (because that’s what our wheelbarrow will hold comfortably) and fill them from the tap before the children arrive. Also, it’s much easier to fill tiny watering cans from one adult-sized watering can than directly from the containers.

Sometimes the children bring their own watering cans!

This last week we also thought of something for the children to do while waiting for their turn. We have a lot of leaf mould that we’ve gathered over the last couple of years, and store in our work area round the back; we bring in a compost-bag of this and decant some into a trug, then have the children sieve it into another trug. We can get four children round one trug comfortably, with room for adults to help too. Then when their friends have watered bits of the garden, they go along and put leaf mould out round the plants, like tucking in the plants under a blanket. This keeps the moisture in for longer, and keeps weeds down, too.

Mind, towards the end of the session we let them just throw the leaf mould onto the flower beds, well away from the paths – most of it falls on the earth anyway, and any that doesn’t get shaken down pretty quickly. And they love it!

Earthworms!

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Earthworms!

15 March 2019

Following on from the last post – it’s still been too cold for the children to sow any seeds, so when they wanted to come and help this week, we decided to go on an earthworm hunt. Over the last couple of years we’ve gradually increased the amount of organic matter in the soil by mulching (covering) it with layers of compost, when available, and leaf mould. The idea was to help the soil hold water better – very necessary last year in that long drought – and to help increase the many microoganisms that help make nutrients available to plants, and generally do a lot of our work for us. We thought it would also have increased the number of earthworms in the preschool bed, making it very likely they’d find some.

So last Monday, we again had two children helping to push a spade down into the bed, then pull backwards (with a little help from an adult holding the handle), so that a lump of earth rose out of the ground on the spade, and split slightly open to reveal a few wriggling earthworms inside it. Then we lowered it to the ground, and they dived in to find them, the bravest of them picking them up, the rest enjoying watching one on my hand. And once again, I’d thought they’d enjoy the digging and rifling through the soil, but I had no idea how entranced they’d be, just with the lump of ground rising up on the spade – there’s nothing like gardening with three-year-olds who are seeing these everyday things for the first time, for making you see them as wonderful, too.

And then they just wanted to dig until it was time to go back to the pavilion; some of them dug the earth along the edge of their bed, while a couple of others took turns to throw leaf mould from the trug onto the ground, which will help us repeat the cycle all over again.

In theory, we don’t dig the ground in the gardens, as it’s much better not to keep breaking up all the mycorrhizal fungi and bacteria under the surface; but this an exception that’s really worth making, just to watch the children’s delight in their gardening.

Preschool helpers

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11 March 2019

Last week we had the pleasure of gardening with a few of the children from Mentmore Road Under-5s, who meet in the pavilion on Mentmore Road playing fields. They’ve joined us ever since we started gardening at the Memorial Gardens, usually sowing things like nasturtiums, peas and carrots, and coming down to see how they’re growing. Eating peas straight off the plant was one of the favourite activities last year!

This year, they were keen to help us back in early February, while it was still cold, too cold to sow anything. So we needed to find things for them to enjoy doing – and the obvious one was to help us get the ground ready for their peas and carrots. Instead of some of the usual Friends of the Earth volunteers clearing away self-sown plants that were in the way, we let the children do it – you can have two preschoolers pushing the fork into the ground next to one of the purple toadflax plants there, then (with a little help from one of the gardeners holding the handle), they can lever the whole plant and root ball up out of the ground. I thought they’d enjoy doing it; I never guessed how entranced they’d be to see it come of the ground, and to look at all the roots they don’t usually see. Some of the other children dug a hole in the next bed, then we all carefully lifted the uprooted plant across, placed it in the hole, and ‘put it to bed’ by filling the gaps with soil and pressing them down with a trowel (gently!). Then we moved another couple of purple toadflaxes to make a group, which gave everyone a turn at whatever they wanted to do.

And then, of course, the bit the children really, really love – the plants needed watering in! From long experience now, we use four child-sized watering cans, half-filled – that’s an amount they can manage without spilling the water over their feet, and taking turns isn’t so bad as your turn comes round again pretty quickly. When I go over to the tap to refill our ten-litre container, some of the children like following me over to have a look around – I love seeing the gardens through their eyes, they take pleasure in the most mundane tasks. They’re a real inspiration.

Dead leaves

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7 July 2018

We’ve been asked a couple of times why there are so many dead leaves on the flower beds at the moment.

They’re there for two reasons; the first is that we’re using them as a mulch, to try and keep moisture in the soil, while adding more organic matter without overfeeding the beds. We recycle all the material we take off the beds as compost, which we add to the beds in autumn to increase soil organic matter, which in turn helps the soil retain more moisture, as well as feeding it. We don’t have any compost available yet, but we clearly needed to do something to make the most of whatever water we’re putting on the beds as it’s been so much hotter and drier than usual, and the heatwave started so early – we’d only just got used to the fact that the freezing wet winter and spring had finally given way to summer!

So even though we wouldn’t expect to be able to use leaves for a year or two after we’ve started a leaf mould bin, we did start rifling through our new bin in the work area behind the Memorial Gardens to see if enough leaves had rotted sufficiently to be put out on the beds to help keep in any moisture there is in the ground. We’d put quite a few new plants in, grown from seed or from cuttings, and we weren’t able to water them every day to establish them; this way we can water them just once or twice a week while they establish. We hope it doesn’t look too untidy! The mulch is making a real difference, everything looks much fresher than we’d expect in this heat and drought, and most plants are still growing on well. We’d still like a few good heavy showers, though!

And the second reason? It’s a great substitute for bare earth when you’re three years old and want to just dig something with a trowel. Last week when the children from the local preschool came over to help us water, we dug up some of the potatoes they’d planted before Easter and found that their second favourite activity (after watering) was digging with a trowel. Problem – there isn’t enough clear soil to let them dig. Solution – we filled a large flexible trug with leaf mould, put it next to the flower beds, and let them dig it out and put it on the earth around the plants, and let them get on with it. Result – happy children and some very well-mulched flower beds!

“Why are you cutting down our bees’ lavender?”

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“Why are you cutting down our bees’ lavender?”

13 August 2017

“Why are you cutting down our bees’ lavender?” said a voice behind me while I was pruning the lavender bushes along the paths. The voice belonged to one of the older children from the local preschool, who often come and help us and watch the bees, dragonflies and other insects as they visit the different flowers – clearly the message had got through!

I explained that the flowers were over for this year, and we needed to trim the plants back so that they’d produce lots more flowers next year. ‘Next year’ is probably quite a vague idea when you’re not yet five, but fortunately the explanation was accepted. Bees visit many other flowers at the moment (we try to have at least two ‘bee magnets’ in flower at any time throughout the year), but it’s true that they go straight for the lavender when it’s out.

The lavender border was started a couple of years ago, when we realised that we needed more structure in the gardens so that they carried on looking good after most of the flowers had faded, particularly as we tend to leave seed heads for insects to hibernate in over winter, and just to look good when there’s not much else happening in the dark cold days. This could look untidy without the more formal structure of the lavender border. Most of the plants are compact varieties – Hidcote, Munstead, Dwarf Blue, Little Lady, Arctic Snow – as although the larger varieties attract more bees, they’re also much harder to keep in check, and would soon take over the paths as well as the beds.

The standard memory aid for pruning lavender is ‘8:8:8’ – prune the bush to eight inches on the eighth day of the eighth month. Not quite so effective if you think in metric! But the general rule applies – trim the plants as soon as they’ve finished flowering, to roughly 20cm all round. Hopefully, we still have a couple of months of warm weather to encourage them to put out new shoots and fill out a little before they stop growing for the winter.

However, to mollify the child who was worried about the bees having no lavender to visit for nectar, we’ve left a few of the later flowers for them!

Looking back over the last few months

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10 July 2017

As the summer flowers give way to the ones that’ll take us through autumn, it’s a good time to look back at how the gardens have been doing so far this year. It’s been quite tough keeping everything going, as we’ve only had two periods of rain several hours long since March, and that’s been it; so we’re having to water a lot more than we usually would to make sure there are always a couple of the bees’ favourite plants in flower right through the year. We should be looking forward to new plants coming into flower in a few weeks, but many of them are two to four weeks early – the Michaelmas daisies started flowering last week, in the first week of July!

Most of the plants established last year are doing OK despite the drought, but this has been the year we trialled bedding plants for their usefulness to bees, and bedding plants seem to be the divas of the plant world – they need constant watering, dead-heading, feeding, and weeding around. With hindsight, they weren’t the best choice. Still, the echiums are settling in and providing bright blue colour in the beds, and welcome nectar for the bees – though nothing like as much as their wild equivalent in the second bed down from the car park, where we have two Viper’s Bugloss (Echium vulgare) plants, tall spikes of smallish blue flowers, covered in bees most of the time. The ‘Disco’ French marigolds provide great bursts of bright orange – but then, so do the California poppies they’ve largely displaced, and while there have been a lot of bees on the California poppies, there haven’t been many bees on the marigolds. The mignonettes are finally growing well and flowering, and they do smell sweet, but it’s taken a lot of watering and TLC to get them established, and we have limited resources. So while they’ve provided a nice change this year, I don’t think we’ll be repeating the experiment. We’ll need to find something else for the children from Mentmore Road Under 5’s to plant next year – they thoroughly enjoy planting things out, and watching them grow and flower!

Last week some of the children had fun picking the peas they’d planted a couple of months ago, and eating them straight from the pod, and they also lifted some of their carrots to see how they were doing (fine, but nowhere near ready). That didn’t seem to bother them at all – they still found it magical that they could dig out little green feathery plants and find a real carrot underneath, even if it was only 10cm long! Next year we’re thinking of getting them to plant early potatoes so they can dig up some buried treasure well before the end of term; we always have to race a bit to get them something to harvest before they break up for the summer. A couple of weeks ago they planted some annuals for the autumn (sunflowers and Cosmos) and a few foxglove and hollyhock seedlings, so that should give them something to watch grow next term. I’m not sure they believed me when I told them the tiny hollyhock seedlings would grow into plants like the ones twice their height in the next bed.

The Leighton Buzzard Observer carried a nice article on June 20th about the cooperation between the preschool and the regular team.

The regular team have been doing more dead-heading and less weeding as our earlier work has begun to pay off, especially as we were able to mulch the ground with almost-ready leaf mould after we’d weeded it. The local blackbirds throw the leaf mould around too much – often, our first task of the day is to brush the leaf mould off the paths and back into the beds. Leaf mould usually takes a couple of years to rot down completely, and what we’re using isn’t quite a year old, so we should have less mobile mulch in future. We’re also thinking ahead to autumn, when we’ll be able to sort out some compost from the bins round the back, and top it with leaf mould to keep weed seeds from germinating.

We’ll also be lifting all the dead plants in the wild flower bed – they’ve gone over much faster than usual, and have grown much less than usual too. This is almost certainly due to the drought – we watered copiously until a couple of weeks ago, when we decided we were just wasting water by pouring it onto the ground to no real effect, as wild flowers don’t seem to respond as well as garden plants and all the annuals were clearly dying back much earlier than usual. So as usual we’ll start the gardening year in September by collecting seed from the poppies to sow once we’ve turned the soil and added compost.

A stick sculpture by the preschool children?

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April 30, 2017

You may have noticed the new addition to the preschool’s planting (in the third bed from the war memorial) –suggestions have included ‘an arty stick sculpture’ and ‘large immobile stick insects’. In fact we’re trying to discourage the local cat or cats who think the preschool’s vegetable area is an ideal cat litter tray; we couldn’t let the children do the planting themselves this year, as there were so many messes around the plot. But they watered the peas in well, and sowed carrots, and hunted for sticks to support the peas and protect them, so they had a good time in the garden again.