Our Allotment
At St Joseph's we are proud to have a school allotment on site, where children in all year groups learn how to grow their own fruit and vegetables.
Please click the link below to see our fabulous children in action in our Allotment and the Paper Garden!
Click to view: Our Allotment
Every week, the Garden Ambassadors and several other groups of children visit the allotment at St. Joseph's. Throughout the seasons, they will follow a journey from seed to plate: sowing seeds, looking after seedlings, planting out and tending vegetables until harvest. Through gardening, we hope to help the children establish a connection with nature and their environment, whilst promoting healthy eating and the benefits of gardening for physical and mental wellbeing. We grow organically so the children develop an understanding of and respect for nature and its inhabitants, and value their roles in the garden space and more generally in our food system. This is particularly important in urban settings, so we recently planted mini orchards with fruit trees, sowed some wild flower seeds and planted out our young vegetable plants for this growing season.
Support in developing our allotment has been very kindly provided by Global Generation.
You can find some photos of some our young gardeners in action below!
This year, our students elected two Garden Ambassadors from each class in KS2. These students meet with our gardener, Anne, on Wednesday afternoons to help with the up keep of the allotment and to come up with ideas on how to improve the environment around the school.
Here is what they had to say:
'As gardening ambassadors, it is our job to ensure our environment is cared for. Recently, we have been growing trees in our allotment which will provide us with fruit. The school environment is our home and we are all responsible for it, this is why we have gardening groups as well as litter picking groups.
We have lots of fun being gardening ambassadors because we know we are helping the planet. We have planted and watched many living things grow both in our greenhouse and in our allotment. Although our main focus is plants, we also look at the soil and have discovered many different organisms such as sea snails who also share our home. Being garden ambassadors is so fun and rewarding as we love gardening and we are helping our environment.'
Greater (Year 5) Zoey (Year 6)