Gardening Club
From October 2025, our re-vamped KS2 Gardening Club will take place on Tuesday lunchtimes. This will be lead by Mrs Conroy. Here, your child can learn about sustainability, help nurture plants, and develop a love for nature.
Our club aims to create a fun and educational environment where children can work together to create a beautiful and productive garden area within our school grounds. So come and join us, and let’s grow together!
Summer 2 – 2026:
Spring 2 – 2026:
Week 5: So much to do and so many people wanting to garden – we have needed to make a new rota! Tuesdays will be for Year 3 and Year 5. An additional day of Thursday has been added for Year 4 and Year 6. This means everyone in KS2 will have the ability to come down and garden one lunchtime a week. Mr Conroy visited us and built 2 compost bays from the pallets donated by Holland’s pies
Week 4: This week we have more to do, plant and look after! We have been thinning out some flower seedlings and potting them into bigger pots. We are thankful to ASDA Accrington – who donated 3 bags of compost. Our sunflowers have started growing for our competition
Week 3: This week we had to plant our potatoes supplied by Grow Your Own Potatoes. We follow the schedule they provide and weigh our total when we harvest them to see which of the two varieties have produced the most! We planted our rhubarb. We will not be able to harvest this until next year, as it needs to root fully in its first year. We also planted 2 ginger plants! Lots going on and lots to harvest later on in the year! Finally, we are very thankful to Holland’s Pies, who donated and delivered 12 wooden pallets to school, so we can make our new compost bays.
Week 2: More planting of seeds inside our polytunnel. This week we started a Sunflower Competition by planting our own seeds. We also planted some lettuce seeds, watered last week’s seed planting in the polytunnel and checked on our bulbs (these are almost ready to sell onto you!)
Week 1: Our new term has brought some better weather with it! This has meant that we have been able to start some planting! We have planted seeds for tomatoes, carrots, peas and sweetcorn – being cared for in our poly tunnel. We are also experimenting with some flower seeds that we collected and were donated. Inside, a selection of indoor plants have been potted up and displayed above some of the coat hooks, making the area nicer.
Spring 1 – 2026:
The weather has been against us for our outdoor gardening this term! However, we have managed to get down to the garden and ensure all our planting is growing and the beds are prepared and tidied! We have been weeding, mulching and loving how our onions and garlic are progressing! We are all looking forward to Spring 2 when we can start planting seeds for the food and flowers we can harvest from Summer term onwards. Over the half term holiday, Mrs Conroy is going to see if we can partner with a local gardening centre to help us develop and progress our gardening ambitions!
Autumn 2 – 2025:
Week 5: We achieved our Level 2 Award from the RHS School Gardening scheme!
Week 4: A cold lunchtime session – but the poly tunnel was lovely and warm! We were potting up Tete a Tete daffodils so we can sell them when they grow. We checked on our onions and garlic (it’s growing!!). We looked after our strawberry plants, mWoving some to a better space, potting up more runners, detaching previously rooted runners from their parent so they can grow on.
Week 3: More organising has been happening behind the scenes! We now have 2 Gardening Club notice boards – along with a suggestion “box” for all children to express their ideas. We have also applied for our RHS School Gardening Level 2 Award – we needed to evidence “We all contribute to our Gardening plans”, “We are learning new Gardening Skills” and “We are using Gardening to support our wellbeing”.
Week 2: The weather, as expected, is proving a challenge to accessing the Gardening Club area. We now have a rota to allow as many children as possible to access the club, as it has been so popular! Children must remember to bring their wellies and an appropriate coat on their allocated week.
Week 1: We were successful at achieving the RHS School Gardening Level 1 Award! Mrs Green presented this to school in our first assembly back after the half term. We are now working towards the Level 2 award!
Autumn 1 – 2025
Week 3: Year 3 and Year 5 invited VIP’s came to the lunchtime Gardening Club. These were all people who had missed out, due to the popularity of the club, on coming down for week 1. We finely weeded one of the raised beds, added some fresh compost to it and planted our garlic and onion sets. Next week will be the turn of Year 4 and Year 6. We have also applied to the Royal Horticultural Society for the Level 1 award in their Campaign for School Gardening! Fingers crossed – then we can start working towards Level 2!
Week 2: At the weekend, Mr Conroy helped to deliver some compost for our beds and to plant seeds into. On Tuesday, we were hampered by the weather, however Mrs Conroy did manage to go down to the Garden area and complete the heavy weeding of one of the beds. Next week, this will require a finer weed and we can plant our onions and garlic into it.
Week 1: Mrs Conroy lead a KS2 assembly and launched our competition to “Name the Garden” and create a logo (details on the attached PowerPoint below). At lunchtime our first session took place. We were overwhelmed with interest and support and had a waiting list of children wanting to come down to the garden area to help. We started weeding, litter picking and a general tidy up of the area.
October – December 2025: Our main focus will be weeding, preparing the beds along with planting our onions, garlic and flower bulbs. We will be patching the damage on the outside of the poly tunnel and starting to plant both vegetable and flower seeds that can germinate in the tunnel over the winter period, ready to plant out in Spring.
Future Plans and Fundraising: We will be looking at working towards the Royal Horticultural Society Campaign for School Gardening Level 1 award. We are identifying grants that we could apply for to help with purchasing equipment. We have applied to growyourownpotatoes.co.uk for some free potatoes to grow – and should find out if we have been successful in February. In addition to this, we plan to raise funds for our equipment by selling our produce (vegetables and flowers) – including our baby plants, so that the children can grow at home.