Hello my name is Mrs Squelch and l run the gardening group on two afternoons a week. We are lucky at Ashleigh to have such a wonderful resource which is a place to nurture and help children to develop to their full potential.

The garden started to be developed in 2008 and is now well established providing a variety of fruit and vegetables for the children and the school kitchen.

The children in the garden groups learn about planting seeds,  pricking out, planting, composting, weeding and how to use tools safely and develop lots of 'life skills'.

This enables me to take a full class into the garden and organise special events with the gardening group acting as mentors passing their skills and knowledge onto the younger children.

I hope you enjoy looking at how we use our garden throughout the year.

Happy gardening!

Mrs Squelch

Pumpkin Arrangements

The children in the gardening group collected flowers and seedheads from the garden and used oasis to create the pumpkin arrangements.

As you can see the children were fully immersed in the activity and felt very proud of the end result.

We had a fun filled afternoon in garden even though it was wet.

The Year 5 and 6 gardening group acted as mentors to the Reception Class children sharing the skills they have learnt in the garden. They were amazing!

The Penguin Class

Mrs Solkar's children have been very busy in the garden creating flower pots containing Begonias for the four adopted War Graves in Darwen Cemetery. The children were split into their team groups and all had a turn at preparing and planting the pots.

As you can see they had lots of fun!

Mrs Davies kindly drove us to the cemetery where we placed a planter on each of the four adopted War Graves.

They have flowered all summer and look amazing on the freshly restored graves.

Planting in Whitehall Park

As part of the  competition 'Whitehall in Bloom' the local councillors asked if the children from Ashleigh could be involved in planting bedding plants at the entrance to Whitehall Park. The Council donated £50 worth of plants to the three local schools which Mr Matthews kindly collected  from the Garden Centre.

The children carefully navigated the wheelbarrow full of plants, tools and gardening gloves to the entrance of Whitehall Park where they were met by the Councillors and spent the afternoon digging and planting.

The people using the Bowling Green were really pleased to see primary school children helping to improve their local environment and everyone commented on the children's gardening skills and how well behaved they were.

Well done to everyone who took part.

Reception Class have taken part in a competition from the Potato Council.

We were sent two varieties of potato, one called 'Rocket' and the other called 'Pentland Javelin' which we planted in containers. We had to water and earth up the potatoes until they were big enough to dig up.

The variety 'Rocket' gave us the heaviest crop and as you can see they tasted delicious at our potato picnic!!!

Here we are celebrating achieving the RHS Level 5 award for taking part in the Campaign for School Gardening.

Well done to everyone who helped in the school garden over the past 8 years.
 

Year 5 picking apples

Alpine garden

I used part of the prize money from the RHS Level 5 award to purchase two stone troughs. The children researched Alpine gardening and helped to design and plant the troughs.

As you can see they are very proud of the finished results.

The troughs now stand at the entrance to the Greenhouse.