@morethanorganic

The outdoors and the wealth of experience it offers is now being promoted increasingly in education as we realise it’s importance for a generation that spend most of their time indoors interfacing with electronic devices. To care about our environment, our children need to understand it. And it is becoming important for us to grow, understand and be connected to our food again. For me the ideal school wouldn’t rely on a few devoted individuals giving up their time, but would make outdoor education a part of the curriculum for all ages.

Growing food is something that many schools are now doing. This is preferable if it takes place in a designated garden area, even if that only amounts to a few large pots. We began with potatoes in buckets and pumpkins in grow bags. Pulling up the potato plants and finding the crop of golden spuds was like finding a horde of treasure in the soil. The children’s faces were a picture! They were without doubt the tastiest potatoes we’d ever eaten. The Potato Council (UK) provides free seed potatoes to schools that register and runs a yearly competition for the heaviest crop. This year our plants were blighted and produced less, but they were still the best we’ve ever tasted, perhaps because these are lower yield varieties which are less hardy but far more flavoursome than the mass produced kind you buy in supermarkets. I am now a complete convert to growing my own Rocket and Vales Emerald potatoes.

Pumpkin soup was another joy, linked to the lovely series of beautifully illustrated story books by Helen Cooper. My class were all happy to try this soup (even the fussy ones) because it was the pumpkin they’d watch grow and they’d had fun sawing up for soup, even if it was a bit messy and even if there were pumpkin seeds all over the floor! Ownership is everything. Not only the successes but the failures are also a great learning experience; the pumpkin that was hollowed out and inhabited by slugs was a major attraction for the youngest pupils.

Since then we’ve grown carrots, broad and runner beans, courgettes, marrows and tomatoes and the eco club made raised beds, enjoying the experience of hammering the nails in and constructing them while my reception class were so eager to move the two tonnes of soil with their mini wheel barrows that we had the job finished in one afternoon.

After years of doing the same sort of things at harvest, I have become bored with the traditional harvest service that relied on dry paper exercises completed in class. So one year we visited a private garden allotment suggested by a parent. A risk assessment was necessary before the visit, but although I had my doubts initially, this became one of our most liked and remembered school trips. The elderly gentleman enjoyed showing us his garden and shared his produce with us. The children responded with interest and delight, answering his questions eagerly and asking some good questions of their own in return. The sight of a school bus of reception children alighting onto the pavement of a small cul de sac and entering a private garden is perhaps an unusual one, but we would do this again. It was a lovely way of looking at the harvest in a way that 4-5 year olds could understand and we later shared photographs with the rest of the school as part of the annual harvest service in the school hall.

The list goes on. Once you start, it’s difficult to stop because that would be a step backwards. Even if you don’t like gardening yourself, you can still give your children a few packets of seeds and somewhere to plant them. I have never forgotten when as a child I emptied a full packet of mixed flower seeds into an ice cream tub full of soil and observed the oddly miniature plants that resulted from the tight squeeze or the years of our vegetable patch when we ate gorgeous, fresh vegetables every day until the sea flooded it and my mother gave up, saying it was no use carrying on because the soil was full of salt and she felt that no one had really appreciated all her hard work anyway!. If that were true I wouldn’t be remembering it now! Perhaps we remember these experiences of being close to the earth and growing our own food or flowers because they are archetypal and part of our existence and survival even if it appears that sometimes we have forgotten.

I suspect that even when I’ve burned out of my teaching job, I’ll perhaps return voluntarily to continue running the eco club for the juniors and a gardening club for the infants because it’s so popular and essential. Our next project is a presentation to show the rest of the school what we’ve been up to and outside we’re remodelling our rather overgrown vegetable garden to be part of an outdoor classroom and wildlife garden.

Rachel Knox

Nursery and Reception teacher and writer, Denbigh, N. Wales, UK.