Gardening Activity Days

Lots of progress has been made this week! For the Monday activity day, volunteers came to help us create four large raised beds - three of which will be filled with wild flower seed in August to attract butterflies and bees into the garden next year. The timber was bought with an "Action Earth" grant, supported by Morrisons supermarket as part of the "International year of Biodiversity." Below are (left to right) Toni Clarke and Mrs Barclay.

We had a huge delivery of soil. Due to the dry weather, the ground was very hard. Mr Locket expertly reversed his tractor and trailer right into the garden and tipped it straight into the beds - which saved us lots of work with wheelbarrows!
This paved the way for day two - Tuesday. Pupils started the day planting up the raised bed with herbs for the food technology classes to be able to use for cooking. Below are (left to right) Mr MacFarlane, Danielle Burton (S3), Catriona MacIver (S3) and Douglas MacLeod (S2). We then planted all the vegetables that had been needing to come out of their pots. For example, courgettes, kale, outdoor tomatoes, radish, more peas and beans - you get the idea! School staff also came out to help on both days. Below, Mrs Mackie is busy weeding.

We did many jobs - for example putting up shelves in the shed. We topped up soil in all the potato bags, made a compost bay from the pallets and did a lot of watering. This involved many trips down the hill into the school building, returning with watering cans full! Well done to everyone for making the activity days so productive and sucessful. All your hard work has set up the garden nicely for us to leave over the summer holidays. Let's hope there is some rain to keep everything alive until our return in August.

Meanwhile, don't forget about the sunflower growing competition at Frank Nicol's garden centre - they are now over a metre tall and looking very healthy! Call in to see them and guess which will be the tallest to help us raise money to buy a goat for a family in Africa.So, the DiGGers wish everyone a happy summer holiday and look forward to returning to the garden in August.