Miss Swallow Departs!

This week, DiGGers gave Miss Swallow a great send-off with cakes and a signed card.  It will be her last day on Friday before she moves to take up a new post in Aberdeenshire.

Danielle and Sara baked cup cakes and added a gardening touch!

We quickly reduced the cakes to a pile of papers!!

Miss Swallow will really miss everyone at Dingwall Academy (especially the DiGGers!) and sincerely hopes that the garden will continue to be looked after.  DiGGers will be taken over by Mr Macfarlane (a familiar face in the garden) and Mrs Morton so good luck to them - "You will be rewarded for your efforts as the DiGGers are all great individuals!"  So "Keep DiGGing" everyone and start growing this year's Christmas Dinner!!

The Forest School Group also had a great session today and will be sorry to see her go!  There was also cake and a wonderful card...

...we finished with a walk to the pond area to show her all the work that has been done in the last few weeks.

The cabin is looking great - Ryan and Alexander did us proud last week speaking about the project in Edinburgh at the "Outdoor and Woodland Learning Scotland" Launch event.  Keep up the good work everyone - I'll be expecting more changes to see next time I visit the woods!

ROWAN event and Spring Fair

Whilst Miss Swallow has been away, there were another two big events that DiGGers were involved in that made her very proud!

The first was an "over to you" event to mark the end of a three year project that ROWAN has been involved in to encourage schools to cut down on their waste.  We are using the RIDAN composter to compost the canteen waste as a direct result of their campaign.  The participating schools presented on their various projects and DiGGers were excellent hosts looking after everyone.  Connorhan and Danielle also did a presentation about the Certificate in Practical Horticulture course that they have been studying.

The event was also combined with presenting our first Growing Hub certificates.  Two pupils from St. Clements were awarded a bronze certificate; well done to them!  Hopefully pictures to follow...

The second event was a new Dingwall Academy occasion - the Spring Fair (Saturday 28th March).  Everyone had a great day; there were many stalls and displays.  DiGGers wrote to local garden centres and supermarkets and were donated plants to sell as well as their own seedlings and seed potatoes.  Again, they worked really hard and did themselves proud raising just over £105 for the club!  Again, pictures to follow...

Finally, Miss Swallow has returned to school albeit three days a week, so we could get cracking with tidying up the garden and have eventually managed to re-anchor the Olympic Jubilee Greenhouse to the ground.

There has been a lot of devastation with the winter winds so we had to gather lots of pots and sticks up that had blown about.

Cutting timber to secure the greenhouse to the ground.
Also during the Easter break, the groundwork has been done for the Outdoor Classroom (hooray!).

 The topsoil from the plot was donated to the garden...so here it is!

Potato Day 2015

DiGGers were pleased to help again this year with the "Transition Black Isle" Potato Day on Saturday 7th March.  Our motley crew of Connorhan, Danielle and Kyle were accompanied by Mr Macfarlane for the day at the North Kessock Village Hall.

We helped out with many tasks - setting up, taking money... 

...helping the public decide which varieties might suit them best... 

 ...and generally helping out.  Potatoes sold well again and everyone had a great day.

 There was a huge range of earlies, second earlies and main crop potatoes - to buy "by the tuber".

 Helping out on the Seed Swap stall too...

 As you can imagine, there was a lot of clearing up to do at the end.  Well done to everyone for such a hard day's work.  We are also grateful for potatoes to take away with us for our own garden his year!

**Apologies for lack of posts recently; Miss Swallow was suddenly taken ill.  She is now on the mend, but has been absent for some weeks!

Welcome to winter!

We have now been back in school for two weeks.  It has been rough weather - both wind and snow!
Last week, we sheltered in the shed and then managed to nail a couple of panels onto our compost bays.

The school was closed last Friday as the area had a power cut due to wind damage across the region.  Here you can see a branch has fallen from the trees above - luckily we were not around for it to fall on!

As always when there is a strong wind, lots of panels blew out of the OJ greenhouse!  When the weather improves, one of our main jobs will be to re-fix the greenhouse to the ground (it is held with concrete blocks just now!) and then add extra struts to secure the panels properly.  You can see also, the benches need to go back in as well.

Meanwhile the rest of the garden is asleep under the snow!

On Wednesday this week, we attached a few more panels.  Our compost heaps now have two panels left to add, then we will have two bays complete.  We will add layers of green garden waste and brown twigs plus sawdust to help the decomposition process.

The old Christmas pudding we put out for the birds had completely gone!  We topped up the table and feeder with seeds and nuts.  Thursday this week was very wet, snowy and cold so we ate our lunch and chatted before retreating early!  We have started to plan crops for next spring and will soon be ordering some seeds.

The Forest School group this week took a snowy walk to assess the storm damage and work that would need to be done to clear the paths at Evanton Woods.

It was very scenic with trees hanging with snow.