It has been a busy week in the school garden. The children have cleared the vegetable beds and turned over the soil ready for the seedlings that we are growing in the classroom. We have also set a couple of rows of potatoes.
Category Archives: School Garden
Spring has sprung!
It’s hard to imagine that this time last year we had a lot of frost and snow! It was lovely to see the early spring flowers during a visit to the school garden today.
Chocolate and Beetroot Brownies
The children were busy in the kitchen this week making chocolate and beetroot brownies. We harvested the organically grown beetroot from our school garden recently and Jessica from the Heritage Council helped the children with this delicious recipe. It was also the perfect opportunity to develop practical maths skills.
Pumpkin Carving
The children have been preparing for Halloween by carving some pumpkins.
Pumpkin Harvest
We were delighted to harvest these two wonderful, organically grown, pumpkins from our school garden to make our pumpkin soup.
Pumpkin Soup and Brown Bread
Fifth and sixth class made delicious pumpkin soup and brown bread today.
Pumpkin Soup
Serves 6
Preparation Time: 15-30 minutes.
Ingredients
750g pumpkin, diced
250 g potatoes, diced
3 medium onions, diced
3 chicken stock cubes, crumbled
840ml water
250 ml thickened cream
Salt
Pepper
Method
1. Place all ingredients, except cream in a large saucepan.
2. Simmer until vegetables are tender.
3. Remove from the heat.
4. Blend with a stick blender until smooth.
5. Add cream and stir through (do not boil after adding cream).
6. Season to taste.
Delicious vegetable soup
It was time to enjoy the fruits (and vegetables) of our labour. The children enjoyed bowls of delicious vegetable soup made from the vegetable harvest grown in the school garden.
Soup Time
It was a busy time in the kitchen as the children washed and chopped our crop of vegetables to make a large pot of delicious soup.
Harvesting the vegetables
We have been looking at our crop of vegetables for the last four weeks – licking our lips and keenly anticipating the harvest. Jessica from the Heritage Council called this week to organise the harvest, help prepare the vegetable soup (the important bit) and get the vegetable garden ready for the winter.
Harvest Time
We harvested a wonderful crop of organic squashes, courgettes, carrots, turnips, onions, garlic, beetroot, potatoes and peas and we learned some important lessons about locally-grown, organic produce. Some of our vegetables did better than others – our beetroot was hugely successful but most of our potato crop was lost to wire-worm. We managed to produce beautiful turnips but our fine crop of carrots must have been some of the ugliest looking veg ever produced. In our second year of trying we have finally grown two handsome pumpkins and we had a fantastic crop of squashes but our pea crop was quite poor. So what did we learn?
When growing organically a wide selection of fruit and veg is preferable and ugly is beautiful! A third of commercially produced vegetables are discarded because they are not “perfect enough” for the supermarkets and the food/kilometers for most commercial fruit and veg is unsustainable. Everyone should Buy Local and Buy Ugly.
