Orchard Area Planted

Forgot to mention that Stephen Elliott has been very busy in the garden and has sectioned out the orchard area with the logs donated by the Forestry Service in Coleraine.  He has planted 2 cox apple trees, 1 pear tree, 1 victoria plum tree and 1 cherry tree.  They will take a while before producing fruit but they will be nice when they do!  Well done Stephen!

Busy Day Today!

Hi all,
we were very busy in gardening club today.  We sowed 3 seed trays of different types of lettuces.  We hope to have these grown by the launch of our garden on the 16th June so that we can serve them on the day.
We also weeded our onion raised bed.  Our onions are coming on really well.
Yesterday Mrs Toman and Ms Nutt were visited by the two members of local gardening clubs (Portstewart and Coleraine) - Mr Lyttle and Mr Turbitt - they were a wealth of information on what and how to grow vegetables successfully.  They advised us to chop the seed head off the rhubarb.  They said that because the rhubarb had been recently replanted from its original home, it was feeling a little bit threatened and therefore it sent a seed head up so that it would know that the seeds would ensure its survival.  By chopping this seed head off, all the energy that it would have wasted in producing the seeds is then sent back down to the roots and makes our rhubarb a stronger plant for next year.  One of the photos shows the rhubarb with the seed head before it was decapitated!!!!

We also potted up our raspberry twig, blackcurrant, blackberry and a rose climber.  They look like twigs just now but you can just about see little buds coming out on them so we hope they will produce some leaves soon and start to grow.

The trees that we received from the Woodland Trust are growing well and now that we hope the frost is over we have moved their pots outside.  When the topsoil is laid out on the other bits of the garden we will plant these out later on in the month.

All in all a very busy day.  We did not get all the task done today that we need to do - still lots of weeding and potting up to do.  We have now agreed that pupils that can come at lunchtimes as well will come down to do a bit of weeding etc. 

Will keep you updated as usual next week.

Back from Easter break.

We weeded our onions and garlic today - little green shoots are coming out of quite a few of them now so they are obviously growing.
Our rhubard is also growing really well and Mrs Toman says we pick be able to pick some of this in about a month so that is not long.
We planted our sugarsnap peas today outside in rows.  They were really easy to plant (we just stuck our finger into the soil; popped the seed in and then covered it up) and we hope they grow well.
We are going to sow the brussel sprouts and carrots next week.
We will keep you up-dated.