Blog posted by Dominic Murphy

Glorious sunshine on our first gardening club of the summer term, and we’re still putting in spuds that we didn’t get in before Easter, squeezing them between the dying daffodils that were planted on a whim last autumn.

Daffodils seemed like a good idea at the time, and we had some vague notion that there would be enough for the children to take home a bunch for Easter. But come the end of last term with the Easter break approaching, the bloom rate per child was a mere two or three. Of course, I could pat myself on the back and say that’s because of high numbers at gardening club, so there were more students to share the crop. Or the moral might be that daffs had no place in our raised beds. Whatever: picking them hardly seemed worth it.

This week, we sowed beetroot, too —  straight into the ground instead of starting them off indoors like last year. The advantage of this is that beetroot don’t like to be moved, so will not have to undergo the trauma of planting them out when they are seedlings.

Last summer, I was cruelly reminded of this fact. The gardening club had sown our beetroot  indoors in the spring term, to give them a head start, before planting them out. However, some weeks later, when the weather was warmer,  the Year 1 class had sown their seeds straight into the earth of their own raised bed.

Guess whose beetroot fared better? Year 1’s — shoved into the ground as seeds and more or less ignored afterwards — thrived. Ours — sown inside the comfort of the polytunnel, loved, watched over and  transplanted outdoors only when the weather got better —always struggled and gave us a pitiful crop of marbled-sized roots.

So with this year’s later sowing at gardening club, we risk the beetroot not being ready at all by the end of term. But firstly, we’re only after golf-ball sized vegetables that are sweeter and much better to eat than their fibrous late-season equivalent: we don’t want our crop growing so
big. Secondly, if Year 1’s efforts are anything to go by, we have nothing at all to worry about.