Gardening with children

It is a grey damp November morning in Harwich, and clusters of children are in an allotment perched on a small cliff overlooking the sea.

One group are watering the winter salad they have sown in the polytunnel that they have put up in the summer. Another group are pricking out seedlings for more winter salad on benches outside, and further group are trying to catch baby frogs. Squeals of laughter echo around the garden.

The children have been creating the garden for one day per week for the last year. Starting from a derelict patch, we have cleared, dug, planted, harvested, battled with the weeds, put up the tunnel and created wildlife areas. “ We” are the children, teachers, teaching assistants, parents, me a professional grower and Creative Partnerships; a national initiative to develop creative teaching and learning in schools. I go to the school every week to help develop gardening skills, Creative Partnerships help to develop the learning techniques in collaboration with the teacher. At the end of the year the project is passed over to the school to run.

The teacher has been using the garden as a way of teaching maths, literacy, science, social skills, and perhaps most importantly the building of self esteem. The teacher herself is a musician and she has used the gardening project as inspiration to create music with her class.

The other vital part of the project is the life skills that are learnt; growing cooking and then eating the vegetables has lead to the children trying and eating a much wider range of fresh produce in one short year. We regularly cook the produce, starting off with simple soups, we have moved on to jams, cakes, (carrot and courgette), elderflower cordial, chutney. The children sell the produce at the fete and Christmas fairs and are currently making a cookery book with stories of the year. This links the project to home, and many parents come in to help with the larger tasks like digging. We have run the garden and cooking on organic lines, with the seeds, compost and gardening methods used, and most of the ingredients where possible have been organic.

This learning style is tactile, and practical, outdoors and grabs the interest of most children. Going back into the classroom the teacher can draw on these experiences to reinforce learning. This project has had remarkable results.

There are also the magic moments, all of us can remember some of these from our own school days. On the day I have mentioned here, there was a thin ribbon of migrating birds silver and white flying against the grey skies, the children all stopped and stared. Half an hour later we were admiring the work we had done when one of the children noticed a rainbow across the sky. This was beautiful drawn in at least one child’s garden diary the next week. An extraordinary moment for an ordinary day.

Marina O’Connell is an Organic fruit grower in Essex, she also runs the Apricot centre, a small training venue on her farm. She works as a Creative Practioner in many schools in Tendring setting up gardens and projects and farm visits in collaboration with teachers.
You can visit my Apricot Centre website at www.apricotcentre.co.uk