Case Study - Pilton Infants School
Pilton Infants Eco Gardening Club 
The Pilton Infants gardening club was formed in April 2007. The school already does a great deal in teaching the children the benefits of being environmentally friendly. They encourage children to pick up litter, re-cycle waste from their classrooms and save energy.
The school eco-action group asked in one of their newsletters if any parents would be interested in running a gardening club, two Mums, Ayesha Wilkinson and Becky Kemp came forward. Both have children at the school. The idea was to rejuvenate the school garden which was looking a bit tired and neglected and get the children interested in growing their own vegetables. We also aimed to teach the children about the life cycle of plants and the conditions in which they grow, composting and its benefits as well as learning about the huge variety of mini beasts that live amongst our vegetables.
Reviving the garden 2007
We cleared the garden of weeds and started again with a blank canvas. The soil was very poor so the first thing we did was dig in plenty of compost and manure. We re-instated the brick edging and replaced the rotten logroll around the tree. The children helped to lay the new gravel on the pathway. The first plants go in. Here we planted runner beans, sweetcorn, pumpkins and squashes, lettuce,radishes and herbs.
We applied to our local B&Q store for a better neighborhood grant and were over the moon when we receive an £80 grant. We used this money to get us started and bought seeds, tools, watering cans and trugs.The gardening club takes place in the lunchtime break and the children were falling over themselves to join in, we had around six children at a time all doing different jobs.
We had a fantastic first year with our gardening club, even though the weather left a lot to be desired. We are all looking forward to the new gardening year in Spring 2008 so watch this space!
The gardening club at Pilton has been so popular we thought we would get the children involved with other jobs around the school, this should encourage them to take pride in the environment that surrounds them. The school has just had some new planters built, so we have had year 1s planting them up with spring bulbs and colourful winter pansies.
Pilton Infants is very conscious of how our school looks to others and with the support of Mrs Bellamy the then Head Teacher we have tried to introduce as much colour all year round as we can. There are many containers and hanging baskets located around the school so we got the children involved in planting these up with winter pansies and under-planted with spring flowering bulbs. At the front of the school there is a memorial tree which the children under planted with a red a white theme throughout summer and winter.
The children have learnt about using different plants for different seasons and the effect the elements have on certain plants. The containers around the school are of varying sizes, the children learnt how to under plant with bulbs, spacing plants and colour matching different varieties.
We now have a fully functioning composting system up and running. The children love peering inside the bins and looking at all the creepy crawlies that live there, we teach them how the composting process works and soon we should be able to show them the finished product. (more information on composting here)
We are very lucky to have fairly large grounds surrounding our school, so there have been plenty of jobs to get the children involved with. We try to teach them as much as we can about the benefits of re-cycling the green waste we have around the school to make lovely compost for the vegetable garden. There are a lot of trees in the school grounds, which means a lot of leaves. We decided to take advantage of this and make leaf mould which is very beneficial to the structure of the soil.
2008
We have found that the space we had for growing our vegetables wasn't nearly big enough so we decided to expand!
We decided to put in some raised beds, these were made from packing cases which srack on top of each other. We stripped of the turf and put it upside down back inside the boxes. This will eventually rot down to make lovely soil. On top of the turf we put a good thick layer of well rotted compost this will give us lovely soil for sowing our seeds.
The children love the planting aspect to gardening best. Here they are planting some lettuces.
We also sowed Radish seeds, carrots, beetroot, spring onions, broad beans, peas and tomatoes. We were lucky enough to be given some strawberry plants which do well in a raised bed.
The finished beds look great and are already very productive. We do have a very bad problem with woodlice which take a liking to everything we plant. But being organic we have to put up with it!
The School Garden June - Beautiful!!
In addition to these raised boxes we have also recently added some long raised beds. These are lower but give us extra space for planting larger crops.
This style of gardening makes it easy for the children to sow and weed as all parts of the box can be reached without having to stand on the soil.
The boxes were built using a timber frame. We then had to remove the turf.
We got our handy Dad Mr Wilkinson to dig over the soil which was hard going as the soil was quite compacted underneath.
We added layers of top soil sand and finally a good layer of compost.
We would like to thank the Devon Gardens Trust Primary Schools project for their kind donation of £100 which helped to make this possible.
We would love to receive any comments on our gardens you can e-mail
Pilton Infants School at admin@pilton-inf.devon.sch.uk
Useful links
Eco-Schools Website
Garden Organic for Schools
Growing Schools Website
RHS Campaign for School Gardening
Kids Gardening