Every pupil at Llandogo Primary School is given an opportunity to experience
the thrill of growing their own food.
Each year group has its own raised bed to work with in their organic garden,
and between them they have grown a fantastic variety of vegetables and fruit.
While the younger ones are introduced to growing with spring onions and lettuce,
the older pupils are producing everything from sweet corn to prize parsnips.
Teacher Gail Roberts says: "The children love it! I think that’s
because they are working together and actually producing something. It’s
lovely to see Year 6 children helping our reception pupils and passing on their
advice. Initially, we looked after the garden as an after-school activity,
but soon all of the children wanted to join in. So we designated a bed to each
class and linked their activities to the National Curriculum – you can
teach almost anything you want through gardening."
As Llandogo Primary is set against the beautiful backdrop of the Wye Valley
in Wales, Gail was particularly interested to discover that some of the leaflets
in the advice section of our school’s website
have recently been translated into Welsh by The Organic Centre for Wales.
The school first branched out into gardening through fruit, rather than vegetables.
Villagers had expressed concern that local apple varieties growing in their
gardens may be lost forever if they were not protected. So the school came
to the rescue by creating an apple orchard in its grounds five years ago, using
cuttings from all of those cherished varieties.
The following year, Llandogo Primary decided to create The Organic Garden.
Gail and the pupils knew little about gardening to begin with. They had to
learn by trial and error - providing some marvellous meals for caterpillars
in their early days! But they are now harvesting plenty of wonderful vegetables
and fruit that they actually get a chance to enjoy themselves.
William, aged 11, says: "We planted some sweet corn and it was great
to watch how it grew. My mum bought some of it and we ate it on the cob – it
was delicious."
Llandogo Primary has been a member of the Duchy Originals Garden Organic for
Schools project almost from the start. Gail says: “It is important for
the children to learn that what they eat will effect their wellbeing. We might
have lost a few crops to caterpillars at the beginning, but there are other
ways round it and at the end of the day all of those chemicals would end up
inside them.”
Organic gardening has also inspired the pupils to look after themselves and
their environment in other ways - Gail describes this as the "domino
effect". For example, the children were given an opportunity to try 30
different varieties of apples, in a bid to encourage them to enjoy healthy,
fresh food. They are now happy to eat only fruit at break times, instead of
chocolate and crisps, and this has helped to clear up the school’s litter
problem because the fruit peelings go straight into their compost bin.
Llandogo Primary School