An edible playground!
Louise Champ from the BBC visits St Mary’s edible garden, which won a Gold Medal at Chelsea Flower Show 2008. After the show it was transported in bits to the school’s garden.
Nick Williams-Ellis (designer):
I was asked by Dorset Cereals if you would come with a design for Chelsea Flower Show [2008] based on the theme of the edible playground, which is the project they run to get schools to do productive gardening as it were. That was the starting point…the most exciting part is that they have gone on to be catalysts for further development within the school.
Lindsey Pritchard (teacher): How do we get a plant out of a pot?
Child 1: You take your fingers on the stalk, tip the pot upside down, give it a bit of a tap and hey presto, it should come out.
Louise Champ: Lindsey, describe for us when this garden first arrived from Chelsea.
Lindsey Pritchard: It was a bit dramatic. It was rainy day and they dumped all these beautiful plants in an empty corner of the playground. We set about trying to recreate the garden from pictures from Chelsea. It really was hard work, but the children helped as well and suddenly we had this garden full of vegetables, tomatoes, sunflowers – everything at once – which is a bit unusual for a garden. And the lettuce and herbs were beautiful.
Child 2: I’m just gonna pour some water on this pear tree and in a couple of days we can pour some more water on it.
Louise Champ: It’s amazing seeing the children’s enthusiasm…
Lindsey Pritchard: Yes, it’s surprising actually [laughs]. Over the winter we grew some lettuce – quite strong leaves like mustard and rocket – and I didn’t think they would like them, but they really enjoyed them. It’s great that they’re getting new tastes. You don’t expect children to like lettuce, but when they have tried them here, they might go home and ask their parents to get some.
Louise Champ to Child 1: We have spent the morning out here in the garden and I have noticed you have been very hands-on. What’s your favourite part of this?
Child 1: I usually like planting seeds…
Louise Champ: You sound like you have a good knowledge of vegetables anyway, but do you feel you have learned more?
Child 1: Yes I have. I have learned how strawberries use their runners to make new plants and how potatoes need to be under the soil at all times otherwise they grow green.
Lindsey Pritchard: Joseph, you told me earlier that this is something you wouldn’t normally have been involved with?
Joseph: Yes, me and Tommy went to gardening for a day and then we got really involved with it and then we started doing gardening club and we find it really interesting now.
Louise Champ: Beforehand when you would sit at home and have your tea, would you ever think about where your food came from?
Joseph: No, not really and it has actually changed what I eat now. I didn’t really eat that much healthy stuff and now I eat quite a lot of fruit and vegetables, because it’s really good to see how it grow and they have really nice flavours.
Louise Champ: Katy, it has gone a bit quiet. Most of the children have gone back into class, but we still have a small group with us, which I believe you head up. So, can you tell us a bit more about that group?
Katy Woodrow (teacher): These four children are part of our SNAG group, which is the School Nutrition Action Group, which we set up in September. St Mary’s Primary School is a Flagship school for the Food for Life Partnership and we have regular meeting where we discuss food issues, gardening, cooking…
Louise Champ: In practical terms, what actually has been changed since this has been introduced?
Katy Woodrow: Gardening and cooking will be built into the curriculum – and the children will get to grow what they’re going to cook, so they can see the whole process from start to finish. We now have a separate allotment as well that we are in the process of building, which is going to be a Key Stage 2 project.
Louise Champ: And that allotment, I believe, was handed over to you from the local community because they became aware of the edible playground?
Katy Woodrow: Yes, we had access to a community allotment, which we have now brought onto our site. We have a poly-tunnel to put up along with some raised beds as well.
Louise Champ: Presumably this is something every school should have…
Katy Woodrow: Yes, and we hope to see it in every school in the future. Whatever space they have, they can start to create small beds just outside the classrooms – and even in the classrooms themselves to begin with.
Louise Champ: When the garden that won at Chelsea Flower Show, which started all this off over a year ago first came here, did you see how far this would go in a year?
Katy Woodrow: I can’t believe how excited the children have been to keep developing the garden. It’s nice to see it now in its second rotation and seeing the things that we have planted in the garden and how we’ve made the garden our own
[Rosetta Tolkovsky is talking in the background]
Louise Champ: Rosetta, can you tell me what you are doing here?
Rosetta Tolkovsky (parent/governor): We are weaving a hazel-fence to define our growing area. We’re going to have raised beds in here.
Louise Champ: And Veronica, why, as a parent, did you think it was important to get involved in this?
Veronica Hudson (parent): I think it’s becoming more and more obvious that so many children – even out here in Dorset, which lots of people living in London and other urban areas think children have access to the countryside – most of the children don’t. And even here in Bridport lots of children don’t have access to seeing vegetables growing and understanding about nature and how important, as Rosetta says, it is to know how vegetables grow and where your food comes from.
And also, food is what you are and that is what this is about. This is about showing children that actually food is a very important part of your entire development. It’s not just about what you learn, because you can’t learn if you don’t eat properly. And it’s fun. It’s great for the kids. This is going to be an outdoor classroom.
Louise Champ: The success here at St Mary’s has been mirrored in more than a hundred other schools across the country and as Patrick Horden from Dorset Cereals explained to me earlier, the demand for these gardens are just continuing to grow.
Patrick Horton (Dorset Cereals): Because of the success of the garden and because he is an incredibly nice and helpful person Nick, the designer, has hundreds of people asking him how to do an edible playground themselves. We then created a website, which gives lots of inspiration on how to do it. Then we realised that there is only so much we can do and so what we thought was, we would try and change Government policy to make it a mandatory requirement for every school in the country to have just a small area in their playgrounds, where they can teach children where their food comes from by the children actually getting their hands dirty growing veg and then cooking it. It is something every child should have the chance to learn.
Louise Champ: Kay, as the headteacher of the school, amazing work that is going on, but I’m guessing that there will always be budget and time constraints?
Kay Rawling (Headteacher): Yes, certainly. We are very fortunate with the staff and the parents we have got here engaging with us. But one of the things I would say as the headteacher is that you’ve got to have the funding that enables you to do all this.
We have been in very fortunate position to have funding through our Food for Life Partnership, which has enabled us to look at the gardening aspect [of food education] and also for me to release gardening experts to work with the children.
If we weren’t in that position, it would have been a completely different matter. It would have been far more difficult. Schools that don’t have that [support/funding] won’t always prioritise gardening within their budgets and I think it’s essential that funding is put into schools to enable them to do this.
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