Regents Park Allotment Garden
A group of Year 7 and 8 pupils from the CSG gardening club visited the Regents Park Allotment Garden to learn how to grow our own food.
Thank you to the School Food Matters charity for organising this event and their ongoing support in developing our school kitchen garden project.
Pupil review
We went on a trip to the Regents Allotments to observe and try some new, unknown fruits and vegetables. During this trip, our knowledge was widened on how to protect plants, how maintaining biodiversity is so important and more…
Firstly, we had a discussion about what allotments are and why they’re so beneficial for our ecosystem. Allotments are patches of land used for growing plants/food, and we discovered that they’re so vital since they preserve biodiversity. This is important since plants are used for food, medicine and more.
After this, we did a tour of the allotments and we came by a small pond. The manager explained how he and the other workers recently had made this pond to breed frogs since frogs eat slugs. On these allotments, slugs are a huge issue as they eat the plants, so having a pond is a great idea which may be brought back to CSG!
Like slugs, birds also eat these plants, and so in some areas, we noticed some netting which the manager explained was for keeping these birds out. While looking at the netted plants, many of us questioned why there were some tiles sitting on the soil, which he explained were actually snail traps, which is another great tip which we will begin using! These plants which were netted were radishes, and an interesting fact was that radishes take just 6 weeks to grow, in contrast to some root vegetables, such as garlic, which can take up to 10 months!
Once we had finished our tour of the allotments, we cut some nasturtiums and other greens including onion chives and mint, then washed and tasted them! My personal favourite was the garlic flower, which I didn’t know existed however it’s very tasty. My friends’ favourites were the mint leaves and chives, though everyone seemed to like a different flavour. Despite this, everyone loved them all.
Through costing the allotments, our knowledge of plants has completely widened. Whether it was learning that spiders can pollinate, that toads eat slugs or even just discovering what an allotment is, we all learnt something new! Additionally, there are many fascinating questions plans to make to the school’s garden which we learnt today…! As well as all of this, and most importantly, we all had fun too!
Loveday Y8
A tremendous achievement by Y7 and Y8 Mathematicians!
Recommended Reading from the School Library on Well-Being and Mental Health