Blog posted by Dominic Murphy

Sometimes at gardening club, everything gels perfectly — the weather, the jobs, the sense of achievement from our brief, Tuesday lunchtimes together. That happened this week when we planted our onions. It had rained the previous day, but the clouds disappeared right on cue. A bed had already been cleared, so we could start planting straight away. But best of all — and this is rare — the group really pulled together.

Often, when there are large turnouts like this one (there must have been at least 15 of us — a lot to control in the garden, believe me) I find myself flitting around different groups of friends, trying to keep some interested, and others out of trouble.

Normally, then, such encounters are chaotic (mildy so, most of the time, but complete anarchy when it is muddy). It is only when a handful turn up and we work as one unit that you could ever call us organised.

But this year, some of the older children in gardening club have been with me right from the start. As well as knowing the ropes, they are now in the top of the school, wearing Senior Pupil badges and keen to show off their authority. Why not, I thought, put this new status to the test?

So I asked a couple of them to take charge of planting our onion bulbs (known as ‘sets’). This is a popular way to grow onions because it is so much easier than raising them from seed. And some varieties (we used ‘Radar’) can be planted in autumn, for earlier harvesting the following year.

I got things going by pegging out rows and explaining to the children how deep the sets should go (the depth of a thumb, about a trowel head apart). Then I left them to it, one girl supervising the planting itself, another handing out the bulbs to a queue of younger children waiting their turn.

I won’t know how well it worked until the sets send up their shoots, but it was a liberating feeling, and hopefully for the children, about as interesting as planting onions can get. I have a new watchword for gardening club this autumn term. Delegation.