Back to school

For almost 7 years now, Jon and I have been involved with an allotment project at our local primary school, which began as a spin-off from the fact that Year Six children have to learn about the Second World War as part of the National Curriculum, and a "Dig for Victory" garden fitted in well with this and the concern at the time about healthy eating in schools.  It's been a great success, teaching the children about how food is grown and enabling them to mess about in dirt during lessons - planting and digging potatoes is always the best fun!

School Allotment in June 2008

We've also found the allotment is a great place for looking for "mini-beasts"; allowing the blackfly on the broad beans to thrive (temporarily) encouraged an influx of ladybirds and allowed the children (and teachers) to see what a juvenile ladybird looked like for the first time. 

Today was my first visit to the site since the Christmas holidays, to winter prune the apple and pear trees and turn the compost heaps over and into one big (hopefully hot) heap.  The little trees actually look quite good.  The pear is a real survivor ('Invincible') , having been uprooted by vandals a few years ago, but after some strong winds recently, needed re-staking.  It's supposed to be a self-fertile cultivar but although it blossoms profusely, it hasn't ever borne much fruit, and none at all for the last three years, so this year I may cheat a bit and bring down a blossoming twig or two from one of mine, and a paint-brush!   

Pear Blossom

Digging Potatoes

The apples are a 'Bramley's Seedling' - which I ought to have pruned more vigorously for shape when it was younger, as it's rather a lop-sided little tree, though looks basically healthy - and a 'Red Devil', which produces a reliable and generous crop of very glossy red fruit with pinky flesh soon after the children return from their summer holidays in September.
Not so good is the general state of the beds.  There are six of these laid out in a rectangular pattern (two long 4' x 16 ones at each end, and two pairs of 4' x 6' in between, a 4' x 10' bed for blackcurrant bushes, then the "Dig for Victory" beds around a reproduction air-raid shelter shaped like a D, 4 and V respectively, and finally a Spitfire shaped bed! 

The school shares the same sandy silt loam soil as we have in our garden and allotment, and after seven years of quite intensive cultivation and the trampling of many pairs of small (and some large) feet, it's looking really poor.  Luckily, the compost heap looks as though it should be ready by March for digging in to one of the long beds and the other has a crop of Hungarian grazing rye grass sprouting up, which we can dig in soon, but improvement is still called for.  Ideally, lots and lots of what the "hortic" fraternity refer to as FYM - farmyard manure - needs rotting down and digging in.  Luckily, I have a good source for this at a local stables where I regularly spend an hour trying not to fall off of a kindly horse.

As I dug out the compost heap onto which the children put left-over fresh fruit and veg, a novel recycling scheme occurred to me.  It grieves me a good deal to see that quite a lot of fruit - particularly apples - is thrown away with little more than a tiny bite out of it (and sometimes no bite at all), also small bags of fresh carrots, where perhaps only one or two have been eaten.  My equine friend would make short work of these treats, and recycle them far more quickly and efficiently than the worms in the heap. 

So the plan is to ask the headteacher if a separate bin for almost whole apples and carrots can be set aside which I can collect and take to the stables, returning with donations to the compost heap from grateful horses.  That's what you call a "cunning plan"!