Landscape Juice

School Garden Project Challenge nears at Malvern Spring Show

Fourteen schools from across Worcestershire and the West Midlands, are battling the elements to design and build display gardens for this week’s Malvern Spring Gardening Show.

In spite of inclement weather, pupils and their teachers have remained in good spirits during the build at the Three Counties Showground, and are now putting the finishing touches to the gardens, ready for scrutiny by a panel of judges on Gold Day.

This year’s theme is ‘Sustainability For All’, and garden seeds have been donated by Dobies and Suttons Seeds.

Malvern’s School Garden Project Challenge, supported by BAM Construct Ltd, was introduced seven years ago, as part of the Three Counties Agricultural Society’s commitment to work with education partners to deliver curriculum-based activities.

Building a garden is a tough, but extremely rewarding experience which enables youngsters to learn and practice a wide range of skills, including designing, planning, communicating and working as a team.

Kingfisher to go beyond transactional retailing to engage its customers

I love the new strategy at Kingfisher (owner of B&Q). See Telegraph - Kingfisher plants a forest to grow sales - and be neighbourly.

With a housing market in steep decline - or at best stagnating - Kingfisher says it will go beyond transactional retailing and invest directly into communities.

The good thing, or at least the way I read it, is Kingfisher is investing in more than one community.

On the one hand it intends to invest by planting more trees than it uses to create its products. It will do this, partly, by investing money in projects administered by the Department for International Development on recently deforested areas that can be quickly turned around.

John Cavill's school projects turn up new ideas

"Kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we're now running education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make." - Sir Ken Robinson advisor on education.

Education is something John Cavill school garden designer and instructor knows about, and so he says you must encourage the kids to laugh. His advice on starting up a school gardening group, in the days of Ofsted and key stage tests, is poignant.

School kids grow with food gardens, Task Force launched

A Food Growing in Schools Task Force was launched at the RHS Chelsea Flower show by the Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman, on Monday, 23 May, keeping the topic of school lunches high on the agenda.

The RHS Campaign for School Gardening has been promoting the importance for children to grow plants. When they issued a report in June 2010, it had found a variety of gardening benefits, amongst those were working in a team, more confidence and better self-esteem.

Free seeds with BBC Dig In

Easter's traditionally the start of the domestic gardening season and garden centre tills should ring the loudest this weekend (although the selling of plants and sundries is forbidden on Easter Sunday).

If you've not already begun your veggie patch or don't even know where to start, pop over the BBC Dig In site for some great tips and advice...as well as free seeds.

The site gives you a daily gardening tip - preparing soil for a veg patch is today's tip.

So you want to set up a school gardening club?

I am a very firm believer that kids could benefit greatly from getting their hands dirty in the garden rather than playing on a computer. I also passionately believe that gardening should be taught at school.

In many cases there just isn't an enthusiastic parent or helper but if you are reading this, and your are keen to get involved and help start a school gardening group, then why not go to your local school (it doesn't even have to be your own kids school) and make a suggestion to the head teacher?