Visit from the Minister of Education today.

We are delighted to report that the Minister for Education  Catriona Ruane visited our garden today.

Follow the weblink below to see her very positive comments about our efforts:

http://www.northernireland.gov.uk/news/news-de/news-de-300910-ruane-visits-north.htm

All pupils involved were really pleased that she had taken time out of her busy schedule to visit our garden.  Everyone was left enthusiastic and encouraged to continue  building on the progress that has already been made.

New residents in our school garden!

Hi all,

we are continuing to get more and more wild residents into our garden.

Conor found 3 litle frogs there on Monday.  Here is one of them below:



Somebody kiss me, please!

 We had a wet day today at gardening club but we were delighted with 2 new members - Ellen and Melissa. 

We tried to make a start at getting the weeding done but it was too wet.

We then got on with one of the other jobs that we needed to do.  Here is a photo of everyone getting stuck into cutting up the plastic bottles for our eco-greenhouse.

Recycling time!

Others were getting stuck into making posters for our eco-council notice board.

The girls hard at work!

We also elected our Eco-council members this week - congratulations to all the newly elected members.  We are very pleased with the amount of applications that we received from all year groups, but especially year 9, year 11 and year 14. 

Well done though to all and hopefully we will be one more step towards the goal of a Green Flag Award from Eco-Schools.

New school year - HARVEST TIME!

Gardening club restarted this week - we have a lot of work to do as there has been many weeds grown over the summer.  But many hands will make light work!  We have been able to harvest some of the vegetables that we have grown - we got the last of the peas, the potatoes and onions.  Our onions are huge and they taste really good too!

All pupils were able to take home some potatoes and onions to reward them for all their hard work. 

Our pumpkins are coming along nicely as well and they are getting very big.

We have noticed that there are loads of lovely ladybirds all around the pumpkin plant - we think it must be attracted to this plant.  We also found loads of caterpillars.  Here is Shea with one of them.

Shea with has furry friend!

We decided that some of the vegetables we had grown was not that great for growing in a school as they needed more attention over the summer months than we were able to give them. 

The ones we definitely want to grow next year are:

• onions
• potatoes
• peas
• pumpkins
• lettuces

The ones that we did not think worked well were:

• cabbages
• broccoli

We will try some other vegetables instead of these next year.  Will update next week with our progress.