Grow @ Goldington
Tell us about your club…
Grow @ Goldington Gardening Club aims to get school pupils to learn about the natural world, how to nurture wildlife, and how grow fruit, vegetables and flowers. It allows the children to develop team work skills, gardening skills and time management, and they have undertaken some enterprise projects to raise money, so marketing and leadership skills were learnt as well. The gardening club runs a garden at the centre of the school and so it is viewed by all pupils, teachers and visitors.
Activities for Winter planting...
- A team of Year 8 pupils led an activity with a local care home, whereby they helped residents decorate and plant Christmas-themed pots. They prepared for a few weeks beforehand, making Christmas decorations we could use in the pots and we spent an afternoon working with a handful of residents of different disability levels to make the pots. Several of them gifted their pots to relatives for Christmas.
- In the run-up to Christmas, as part of our Level 4 RHS award, Grow @ Goldington decorated plant pots in Christmas themes, then planted and nurtured bulbs in them for sale to staff, students and visitors to raise funds for future gardening projects. Students developed planning, time management, planting and marketing skills.
- We also ran a cake sale with garden-themed cakes (‘grass icing’, carrot cake etc!) to raise some money to buy materials for our projects. Members of the gardening team made the cakes and we sold them at break time to the whole school – a real treat as usually students are only allowed to eat fruit at break time!
Current and future projects...
- We are currently developing an abandoned area to use as a fruit garden. This is time and money-dependent as we need to raise money to buy resources such as planters and soil.
- We are building a wildlife area and have a small washing up bowl pond as well as a bug hotel and the hedgehog house I won in David Domoney’s competition will be a fantastic addition to this area.
- We plan to build a greenhouse out of 2 litre plastic bottles, to demonstrate sustainability/upcycling and provide a greenhouse that otherwise we can’t afford to buy.
- We need to raise money to purchase more planting areas for the garden, raised beds, etc. as we hope to develop areas such as a sensory garden (to work with our inclusion room), a science area (to grow plants we regularly use in science), an herb garden (for use by food and nutrition students) and an area of beauty that the Art department can make use of.
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