School Gardening Club.

prettypennies

We are starting a school gardening club so I am on the lookout for the following items as cheap as possible:

Child size gardening gloves
Trowels
Waterproof (plastic) overcoats
Mini plastic greenhouse

Lots of other stuff we will need eventually but we are going to start off with planting a few herbs and salad leaves.

D&DD

Wilkinsons do packs of two kids gardening gloves usually,have you tried asking for sponsorship/donations from a local garden centre
The Kitchen Garden Magazine also do a schools pack with loads of seeds a chart and other bits in it they may have it on their website if not I'll track down the number from an old copy

frugallass

register here too.... http://www.morrisons.co.uk/letsgrow/

jasmin10

Try having a look at tts-group.co.uk

They sell all the stuff to schools but also supply private people to. when you do a search on their website just type in one word though as the earch isn't very good, i.e. spade etc.

Pippilongstocking

Councils as part of their - healthy eating stuff - generally have a person in charge with them or NHS - kinda community worker person, they have budgets etc for this kinda thing - we set up 6 schools with gardens/clubs through this kind of scheme - might be worth a call to council - Co-op good for small grants too.

Local horticulture college, parks dept etc??

Goodluck, great idea

angelavdavis

I took a year off work about 7 years ago and helped my cousin run a school gardening club - it was great fun.

I can't recommend enough posting on freecycle to ask people for donations of gardening stuff - we got loads of hand-trowels, seed trays and watering cans.

I found that the local council also put us in contact with someone at the parks department who gave us their excess summer bedding to plant out.

In addition, because you never had enough equipment(!) I found that you could double kiddies up with a watering can and they would happily water anything green they could find!!!

prettypennies

Thanks for all your replies. I have put a request on my local freecycle for any unwanted tools. A lady contacted me with an offer to send my school her Morrisons Let's Grow vouchers, which is great. We are collecting them, but we are only a little school, so it is going to be hard to collect enough to get much.

I looked at TTS, they seem to be the best for child gardening gloves.

I managed to get some plastic trowels from B&Q (set of three for £2.48). I also asked them if they provide any assistance to local schools, but they weren't very forthcoming.

Of the 150 kids eligible to apply to the gardening club, over 60 put their names on the list:eek: Which was a great response. At the moment we can only really have 20 kids at once after school. But we are hoping to do some things during school time for everyone to join in with.

We had initially hoped to tackle 5 old raised beds in the school grounds, but after getting someone in to look at making the tops safe (they are made of breezeblock with a concrete edging) we have reluctantly had to put that on a backburner until we can secure some funding from somewhere.

We have decided that fro the first few sessions we will:

Plant lettuces and herbs indoors
Set up a school composting project
Create some birds feeders
Do pumpkin carving and tasting session.

If anyone has other ideas they would be welcome

tanith

What about planting up some pots of bulbs to put around the school come christmas time... if planted now things like hyacinth, narcissi, snowdrops, etc would be ready and the kids could watch as they shoot and grow over the next couple of months then when they are finished the bulbs could be planted out in the garden...

angelavdavis

prettypennies wrote: »

Thanks for all your replies. I have put a request on my local freecycle for any unwanted tools. A lady contacted me with an offer to send my school her Morrisons Let's Grow vouchers, which is great. We are collecting them, but we are only a little school, so it is going to be hard to collect enough to get much.

I looked at TTS, they seem to be the best for child gardening gloves.

I managed to get some plastic trowels from B&Q (set of three for £2.48). I also asked them if they provide any assistance to local schools, but they weren't very forthcoming.

Of the 150 kids eligible to apply to the gardening club, over 60 put their names on the list:eek: Which was a great response. At the moment we can only really have 20 kids at once after school. But we are hoping to do some things during school time for everyone to join in with.

We had initially hoped to tackle 5 old raised beds in the school grounds, but after getting someone in to look at making the tops safe (they are made of breezeblock with a concrete edging) we have reluctantly had to put that on a backburner until we can secure some funding from somewhere.

We have decided that fro the first few sessions we will:

Plant lettuces and herbs indoors
Set up a school composting project
Create some birds feeders
Do pumpkin carving and tasting session.

If anyone has other ideas they would be welcome

Sounds great fun! Gardening was always popular when we ran the club.

I would suggest you get in contact with your local council to see if they can help out with surplus plants. Also, in our case we have a not for profit company that is actually staffed by people with learning disabilities who do gardening too, they offered to help us with some heavier preparation work. I would also approach larger garden centres such as Notcutts to see if they can help in some way.

prettypennies

Well we had the first meeting of our gardening club today. The children were all keen to get stuck in. We started by asking the children waht they would like to do over the coming weeks. Planting veggies and making homes for wildlife were popular requests.

Despite the rain we managed to get outside and plant some salad leaves and cress. We have put them in the mini greenhouse in the school quad for now. Although it's sheltered, I'm not sure if it will be warm enough for the seeds to germinate. We may have to try and find somewhere inside to put them.

There was about 15 minutes left at the end of the seesion so we let the kids look through some gardening books to find ideas about what they would like to grow.

Next week we are thinking of doing something pumpkin related to tie in with halloween.

We could do with getting together some resources for 'filler' activities for the children to do if the main activity takes less than the 45 minute time slot.

Any ideas?

angelavdavis

Well, you can always decorate pumpkins (rather than carving them)

This link provides some ideas including templates:

http://www.betterrecipes.com/holiday/halloween/halloween_pumpkins.html

Again, I would post an appeal on freecycle to see if anyone has any small pumpkins available.

Other fill in activities - planting onion setts - ensuring they are the right way up?!