Garden Party - A great day had by all!

 On Thursday, pupils from three primary schools: Marybank, Dingwall and Tarradale came for a day of activities.  Pupils from the "How does your garden grow?" elective class were in charge of the activities and did a great job.  DiGGers were in charge of catering and generally looking after everyone!

Above you can see leek seedlings being planted out.

Activities involved exploring the garden!

...completing a quiz.

Also, learning knots ...

... this one is a "clove hitch"...

... they could then be used to build structures for beans to grow up.

Grigor demonstrates how to plant a runner bean plant.

Doing a "feel test" to see if they can tell the difference between different types of soil!

Garlic bread warming on the BBQ for lunch

Each school brought produce from their own gardens to share!

An orderly queue for soup at the BBQ (homemade from our very own leeks and potatoes)

There was not much left over after this lot had finished!

 After lunch, Danielle, Catriona, Charlotte and Lewis announce the winners of the sunflower competition - Dingwall Primary - with a height of 92 cm.  Tarradale came second with 67 cm and Marybank third with 33 cm.

 Lewis presented the winners with the trophy.  They were very proud to win it.

 Last year's "smile" potatoes were discovered in the soil.

 The "team" looked after all the catering and set up the table - covering the cakes to protect them from drizzly rain.

 Lewis's amazing cup cakes!  Pupils were collecting the cocktail sticks after eating their cakes!

 Lewis's grand-dad joined in and did a good lot of weeding.  He also showed lots of pupils different grubs and invertebrates.

 Charlotte making a hot chocolate.  DiGGers did themselves proud looking after all the children.

 Various bugs and grubs.

The day ended with toasted marshmallows

We also passed a "talking pumpkin" plant round - you can only talk when holding the pumpkin plant!  People then said what they enjoyed most from the day.

I think this face says it all!  Thank you to everyone who came to the garden party - maybe some of you will join the DiGGers next term?!  And thank you to both my Gardening class volunteers and the DiGGers for doing such a great job of looking after everyone.  Have a lovely holiday and see you next term!!

Wednesday "Activity Day"

 On Wednesday, we had an "Activity day" so welcomed other pupils into the garden to help us with jobs!  Here you can see some "visitors from space" have landed to paint the shed!

 Meanwhile, we were putting up a gazebo in preparation for our first Garden Party on Thursday.

 

 Jack and Alan did an amazing job with the weeding!

 We bought a "Lewis MacKenzie Trophy" for the primary schools to compete to win.

 Connorhan ties up the Walking Stick Cabbages.  We are leaving them to form seed pods so we can collect the seeds in the autumn.  They really needed staking as they had flopped right over the paths!

 Mrs Cormack kindly lent us her BBQ for the Garden Party, so we tested it out today by making hot chocolate and toasting marshmallows.

 We put bunting on the gazebo for a festive feel.

 Drinks for all.

 Alan was suffering with hay fever so the weeding had to stop for a while and they made a good supply of paper pots.

 Lewis runs with our very own olympic flame!  Charlotte, Catriona, Danielle and Lewis were "messing about in the shed with origami!"

 Amy, Thomasin and Victoria worked really hard weeding the path.

 Danielle was weeding from the other direction so we could meet in the middle

 Mmmm, is someone trying to quieten her down? lol

 This one would make a good caption competition!

 Connorhan, Jack and Alan dig up potatoes and garlic.

 A good crop of earlies ready to make leek and potato soup for the Garden Party

 We were lucky with the weather - not sunny, but not too rainy either!

 Showing Alan how to plant out peas.  Connorhan has made an excellent wigwam for them to climb up.

Miss Swallow made potato and leek soup that evening, and on Thursday, the DiGGers made garlic bread (with our own garlic) to eat with it.

St Clements enjoy a visit and our Potato Competition goes public

Today we enjoyed having some visitors in the garden.  Pupils from St Clement's school, one of our local primaries came up for a morning of activities.  We started by getting to know each other and remember names - each person had to think of an animal that began with the same letter as their name.  The garden had a dog and a few cats in it - including lions, a jaguar and meer cat!  Other creatures included a kangaroo, elephant, zebra, lizard, alligator, dragon, massive snake and a bird!

After exploring the garden in order to find the answers to a quiz, and having drinks, they learned about worms.  Did you know a worm has five hearts?  It breathes through it's skin and has a "saddle" where eggs are formed.  It is also a myth  that if you cut a worm in half, both ends will live - not true - only the end with the saddle (light coloured bulging bit) will survive!  They then hunted for different kinds of worms by digging in soil, fishing about in the leaf mold pile and investigating the compost heap (where stripy ones were found).

 A couple of worms and a lava 

 Stripy ones like it in the compost heap.

 Luke found a feather - from a crow perhaps?

After lunch, they helped us plant some peas, sunflowers and other plants.  

  We finished by passing round a "talking sunflower" (instead of a "talking stick") so each person could say what they had enjoyed the most.  We were lucky with the weather, and everyone had an enjoyable time.  They invited us to visit their garden in return, so we look forward to that in future.

 We waved them goodbye.  Thanks for coming, we hope to see you again soon!

 Afterwards, we put labels on each potato plant bag (in case we got the numbers mixed up!)

 We loaded all 23 plants into Mr MacFarlane's pick-up truck...

 ...and drove them to Frank Nicol's garden centre.

 We put them on display so the public can guess which they think will grow the most potates.

 Jimmy from the garden centre was happy for us to set things up.  We are grateful that they will top up the plants with soil as they grow!

 Don't forget, we are raising money for the Highland Hospice this year - people can donate at justgiving.com/diggers.

 We then drove to the Greenhouse Community shop.  The sun was getting to Danielle and Grigor, so they rested in the shade!

 Lewis, Mr MacFarlane and Catriona set up the display

We left an information board about the competition for people to read as they have their refreshments outside.  Thanks to the Greenhouse for looking after the rest of the plants for us!  Lewis works in the shop too, so he can top them up for us as they grow.