Blog posted by Dominic Murphy

For the past two weeks, the children and I have been clearing the raised beds in preparation for the summer break: weeds go for composting, veg and salad head for the kitchen. However, we are going to leave some plants for the  holidays — not the original intention, but it seems criminal to uproot them at the moment.

Chief among them are our climbing French beans, which have only just revived themselves after the bashing they got from recent cold weather and slugs. If everything had gone to plan after we sowed them in May, they should have been cropping by now.  But with the erratic British climate, plans are there to go wrong and things don’t always grow like it says on the  seed packet. Now our beans are only just beginning to bush out on their teepee frame,  a few flowers peeping through here and there.

As far as these climbers are concerned, poor weather might now work in their favour. If we have a wet summer like 2007, and temperatures remain reasonably normal for the season, they will still be going when the children return in  September. Like last year, there should be enough to make a couple of lunches for the entire school (the variety, ‘Blue Lake’, is a fabulous cropper).

If, on the other hand, the weather stays sunny and dry (stop  laughing at the back), I don’t mind popping over to the school to water the beans now and again, especially if it means I can bring some back for supper. I’m sure some of the children and their parents will help out, too, because the school is right in the middle of the village. One way or another, the beans should muddle through.

Another good reason to leave these plants in place is that their luxuriant growth should keep down nearby weeds  — the latter being deprived of light and water.

Less work to do when we come back in September, and a few free meals in the meantime — it can be handy when not everything always goes to plan.

Dominic will be back in September with his latest news and lots more ideas for the new term! 

Dominic Murphy’s new book The Playground Potting Shed: A Foolproof Guide to Gardening with Children is published by Guardian Books, priced £12.99. To order your copy for £10.99, visit guardianbooks.co.uk or call 0870 606 4232.

Blog posted by Dominic Murphy

The children have been agitating to dig up their potatoes for several weeks, the lush top growth of the plants suggesting masses of tubers under the soil. But I have been resisting,  waiting for flowers to fade and foliage to die back — a sign that these ‘first early’ spuds are genuinely ready to crop.

We’re into full harvest mode now, and this week we picked our first mange tout and courgettes (the latter, a variety called ‘Defender’ that we grew in pots in the polytunnel, has begun cropping after only eight weeks).

These two will only play bit parts in school dinners, mixed in with other veg or in sauces, simply because we lack the facilities to grow bulk quantities of them. The potatoes, however, are a different story: we have a whole raised bed devoted to them, and pulling them up has to be the high point of the gardening club year, simply because the quantity we collect in
our short lunchtime session is enough to make 100-plus meals.

Harvesting spuds is best done with a garden fork, gently getting under the plant and levering the roots upwards. A textbook harvest, I imagine, would see members of gardening club making an orderly progression from one end of the potato bed  to the other, leaving no plant unturned and taking care not to spear the tubers. The reality, however, is more chaotic, a dig-and-grab frenzy, with the children competing with each other to find the most potatoes.

It’s like one of those TV programmes where everything in the supermarket is free and you have 60 seconds to collect as much as you can. And I know which one I’d rather watch any day.

Dominic Murphy’s new book The Playground Potting Shed: A Foolproof Guide to Gardening with Children is published by Guardian Books, priced £12.99. To pre-order your copy for £10.99, visit guardianbooks.co.uk or call 0870 606 4232.

Blog posted by Dominic Murphy

The end of term is on the horizon, with little more than a month before we down tools for the summer holidays, and there’s a demob atmosphere in the school.  At gardening club, though, we’re kept busy with weeding, watering and cropping bits and pieces (the best is yet to come). Last week, some of our broad beans were used in a fund-raising curry that went out to homes around the village. Then there was the year’s first harvest of salad leaves, which the children had served up with their lunch.

Though it is late in the term, we have also just sown basil - enough so that, in a few weeks,  each child in gardening club will have a pot of their own to take home. Aim for three seedlings to a 15cm pot: it’s crowded for a plant that can reach 45cm, but I reckon it will all be eaten well before it gets anywhere near that size.

There are many varieties of this most delicious herb on sale, but we grow the popular and versatile ‘Genovese’: call it common if you must. Seed packets will tell you the weather is now mild enough to grow this herb outdoors, but you’ll get far more reliable results keeping it inside. And growing in a pot, it is surely made for the kitchen window ledge, to be plucked as the fancy takes you and tossed over your supper.

Dominic Murphy’s new book The Playground Potting Shed: A Foolproof Guide to Gardening with Children is published by Guardian Books, priced £12.99. To ,order a copy for £10.99, visit guardianbooks.co.uk or call 0870 606 4232.

Blog posted by Dominic Murphy

The recent wet weather might have played havoc over the half term break, but it hasn’t dampened our spirits at gardening club. We’re feeling upbeat after a group of us went up to the Chelsea Flower Show to see the Edible Playground garden, and some of the children were interviewed on TV. The garden even featured some beetroot that we had grown at school: that’s right, Thornford School veg at the most famous garden show in the world. Best of all, though, the Edible Playground won a gold medal and top prize in the courtyard gardens category (click here for more).

The rain has, however, brought out the slugs and snails, which have been feasting on the climbing French beans we planted out before half term. Now they lie forlorn and riddled with holes at the bottom of the bamboo teepee we made as a support. Luckily, there were more beans in the polytunnel as back up, so we have planted those as well. Fingers crossed, this second batch will soon grow big enough to survive regular nibbling. I could bore for England on ways to control slugs and snails, but I’ll spare you the full essay. However, there are some basic rules which will help keep these pests at bay. The best starting point is to take away their hiding places. Both creatures love cool, damp areas to hang out during the day, coming out at night to attack your plants. So keep the grass short near your vegetable beds, remove plant and other debris such as broken flower pots, too. This will help but won’t eradicate the problem. Unfortunately some slugs live in the soil, but you can help to disrupt them by regular hoeing, exposing eggs and creatures to the birds. I also swear by nematodes, a parasite that attacks the slugs and is recommended by organic growers (see www.organiccatalog.com). Unfortunately, it is expensive, one six-week treatment for our garden costing about half our annual seed budget, but I know it works. I could go on and on with this fascinating subject, but instead check out a good article on eco-friendly slug and snail control here

This week, also, we harvested our garlic, planted out way back in December. It’s been put on a shelf indoors to dry, though if the weather were more reliable it would be best hanging outside in the open air. Next week, we’ll have a go at plaiting it. Luckily my eldest daughter comes to gardening club and is a dab hand with the garlic plait. I confess that, despite having two daughters and having done their hair on occasions, my plaiting skills are not all they should be.

Blog posted by Dominic Murphy

There has been an incident in the polytunnel. Somebody has used the hose to water the seedlings, and our neat rows of seed trays and pots look like a battlefield. I am sure whoever did this was only trying to help, but you can imagine the carnage when a powerful jet of water hits a tiny plant. Now, several of the seed trays look like a squirrel has broken into our nursery and been digging round for its lost nuts.

It is no use being angry. Children love watering, and plants need a regular drink, so it makes sense to bring the two together and at school, we have a watering rota for the weekdays. On these unsupervised occasions, there will inevitably be casualties, but you just have to be philosophical about it. Enough plants survive and if you keep repeating to the children ‘Watering can and rose - not the hose’, the message might eventually sink in.

Although it is mid May, we are still sowing seed, but with a view to the children taking plants home and growing them on, rather than keeping them at school. It’s the perfect time to sow courgettes, for example. Sow in individual pots of compost with the seeds on their sides and place on a sunny window ledge or in the polytunnel. They will only take a week or so to germinate, and when they are about 10cm high they should be sturdy enough to go in the ground. For those with no garden to speak of, compact varieties, such as ‘Venus’ and the yellow ‘Burpee’s Golden’ , can be grown in large containers (at least 30cm deep).

Pumpkins can be started in a similar way, though typically they need around 2m of growing space and would need a whopper pot to cope with them. For a monster fruit, you should go for ‘Atlantic Giant’, but be warned that many of the larger varieties do not have the flavour to match their size. A good one for eating and big enough to carve for Hallowe’en is ‘Small Sugar’.

Dominic Murphy’s new book The Playground Potting Shed: A Foolproof Guide to Gardening with Children is published by Guardian Books, priced £12.99. To order a copy for £10.99, visit guardianbooks.co.uk or call 0870 606 4232.

Blog posted by Dominic Murphy

Dominic Murphy, Gardening Correspondent for The Guardian runs a gardening club at his local primary school in Dorset. Here is his blog. Watch out for his regular updates…

The carrot and beetroot seedlings we sowed indoors in March are now 3cm high and big enough to be transplanted outside. Big enough, but not yet tough enough - which is why for the past week we have been hardening them off, and will continue doing so for the next week.

‘Hardening off’ means acclimatising plants to the great outdoors, and all the perils that come with it, before planting them out. A healthy specimen will be better able to withstand the cold, wind and the attentions of pests. The process involves leaving your charges in the open air for gradually longer periods of the day, until they can remain outside all the time. Think of it like going into the chilly British sea - it’s less of a shock if you do it gradually, splashing yourself with water before you take the plunge. However, while the theory is sound, the reality in a school is a tad more tricky. Who is going to remember all that bringing in and out? At our school, we have found the simplest method is for me to do it, moving the plants outside when I take my girls to school and bringing them in when I pick them up. If exceptional cold is forecast, the seedlings just have to stay indoors all day. It’s a common sense thing really, not perfect, but it suits us. Now you know the theory, find a method that works for you.

Blog posted by Dominic Murphy

Back from the Easter holidays, and I am trying not to panic. There is so much we need to sow soon if we are to get crops before the end of term. OK, so the children really enjoy the  planting, watering and weeding, but a harvest. . . now you’re talking. 

At gardening club, then, we mostly grow vegetables that crop quickly. If the children like to eat them, all the better. We don’t, for example, bother with the likes of broccoli and cauliflower - not only can they be tricky to raise, but they take ages to mature so will need weeding and watering over the summer holidays. If it is really wet like last year, there is a chance they would make it through to autumn term, but although Britain is renowned the world over for it’s rotten summers, I don’t think we should bank on it. 

It is mid April, time for sowing mange tout in pots in the polytunnel (they could go outside if you wish) and potatoes.  We are planting Arran Pilot after a local gardener recommended them to me (it always pays to take note of what works well in neighbouring plots; not so much keeping up with the Joneses, but learning from them). These are what’s known as ‘first early’ potatoes, which describes the time they take to mature.  Yields won’t be as high as ‘main crop’ spuds, which are harvested in late summer and autumn, but this sort can be dug up in 11 weeks or so. 

Potato planting, where sprouted tubers are put in a trench in the ground, is great to do with children. Sowing small  seeds can be fiddly and younger children especially need close supervision. Potatoes, on the other hand are not only easy to handle, but the digging and the weird-looking, over-size seed give the process a cartoon-like quality.  

Dominic Murphy’s new book The Playground Potting Shed: A Foolproof Guide to Gardening with Children is published by Guardian Books, priced £12.99. To order your copy for £10.99, visit guardianbooks.co.uk or call 0870 606 4232.

Blog posted by Dominic Murphy

Gardening club has only managed three get togethers this past half term, mainly because the Easter holidays are so ridiculously early. Normally we would not break up until early April. The result has been an intense few sessions of sowing indoors and preparing the ground outdoors, cramming as much into our weekly lunchtime meetings as we can. Gardening has an image of a leisurely, if physical, pursuit. If only . . .

We meet every Tuesday for 45 minutes - stuffed into our polytunnel if the weather is iffy, spread out on the grass if it is dry. Numbers vary. A dozen or so children turn up on a fine day, about half that when it rains.

But there is always something for everyone to do. In the polytunnel this past month, we have sown carrots in ‘modules’, which simply means an individual container as opposed to a tray. Sowing carrots this way, then planting them out lock, stock and barrel with plenty of compost around them, you are less likely to disturb their roots - and carrots get very upset when their roots are disturbed. The roots of carrots also hate having to burrow down into heavy, wet soils such as our clay, so we are growing a round variety, ‘Parmex’, which will not have to dig so deep and is more likely to thrive in our conditions. The children might find some comedy value in its unusual shape. Some gardeners would advocate sowing carrots straight outside, but at school we have to give ourselves time to clear all the weeds in our
vegetable beds. Besides, sowing them indoors gives the carrots a head start, away from pests and temperamental weather. By the time it comes to planting them outside (when around 2.5cm high), they’ll hopefully be tough enough to cope with what nature has to throw at them. I say ‘hopefully’ … Both the downside and the joy of gardening is that you never know what tomorrow will bring.

Dominic Murphy’s new book The Playground Potting Shed: A Foolproof Guide to Gardening with Children is published by Guardian Books in April, priced £12.99. To pre-order your copy for £10.99, visit guardianbooks.co.uk or call 0870 606 4232.