My job often leads to garden envy. Other people’s plots always seem to have fewer weeds and healthier plants and a recent visit to Churchdown Village Junior School Garden Club was no exception.
Sunflowers were feet ahead of mine, the youngsters were already starting to harvest courgettes and their baskets of summer flowers were full of colour.
The club has been running under the leadership of teacher Rachel Cottell for 10 years with around 30 members ranging from seven to 11 years old.
Set alongside the playground at the school near Gloucester, it has beds full of vegetables and flowers, fruit trees and a packed polytunnel, bought two years ago with help from the school’s caterers, its PTA and Gloucestershire Federation of Gardening Societies (GFGS).
I was invited to visit by Rebecca Henwood, who along with Wally and Greta Palmer volunteers at the club. Rebecca explained that it started simply, growing potatoes in stacks of tyres on the playground and with a much smaller ‘allotment’, part of which used to be shaded by a large sycamore.
“Everything grew at a rather jaunty angle,” she said.
The club meets weekly after school but is limited to March to September when the evenings are light.
Jobs for the week are listed on a whiteboard and the pupils are allocated a task – anything from weeding to watering. When I visited, they were busy painting bug hotels.
“During the day they look at the board” said Rachel. “Then, when they come they’ve got some idea of what they’re going to do.”
Other jobs the week I visited included clearing and rearranging things in the polytunnel, which us being used for tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, courgettes, and even grapes.
Rebecca explained that some of the pupils have now been in the club for a few years and help teach newer members.
“The younger ones are watching what the older ones are doing, which makes it a lot easier.”
As well as learning about growing things, the children are encouraged to find out more about the wildlife that uses the space – encouraged by an impressive display of wildflowers alongside the polytunnel.
Leaflets on the perimeter fence help them to identify butterflies, beetles and other bugs. It’s certainly a popular part of garden club with many of the young members keen to discover the insect life.
Lucy, aged 10, told me she liked what she described as the strong bond with nature: “I like to know how the world works”.
And Daisy, also aged 10, said simply that she liked growing things and thought the flowers were important.
“The flowers on the path make the garden pretty and more colourful.”
Like the school, garden club is fully inclusive, welcoming everyone and has helped some who find it difficult to socialise.
“Some just want to dig holes,” said Rachel. “Others just want to water, some just like to look for insects.”
It’s also used by other parts of the school be it supplying things to draw in art lessons, or science lessons exploring how light affects how fast things grow.
The children are encouraged to eat what they grow with produce often cooked in the cookery classroom, which has raised beds full of herbs and salad veg outside.
They also took part in last year’s RHS ‘Big Soup Share’ and produced 120 bowls of soup using both their own vegetables and some donated by Tesco. The soup was served to members of a local mothers and babies group and also to an Age Concern club.
They’ve been given the highest accolade, a level five, in the RHS’s School Gardening Awards, and have won gold in the schools’ contest for a basket of produce at the Malvern Autumn Show.
The highlight of the growing year is the end of term event. This started as a garden party for supporters but is now a farmers’ market visited by the whole school.
Members of the garden club sell food made from their produce – courgette cake and cucumber and elderflower ice lollies have been popular. They’ve also made pressed flower bookmarks and the bug hotels are for this year’s event.
Forget garden envy, I just wish my school had run something similar when I was their age.