School Gardening

2023

September 

We were delighted to receive our Cumbria In Bloom results this month and to have maintained our silver level in the School Gardening Competiton and for our continued works in improving biodiversity in the school grounds to also have been recognised.

March

February 

2022

This year we are delighted to have been awarded a Silver award from Cumbria in Bloom. We also received a Gold award for Biodiversity,  Silver-Gilt in the Woodland Copse class, and Silver-Gilt in the Queen's Jubilee class. What a wonderful way to celebrate our gardening achievements for the last 12 months!

2021

2020

At our school we hold an annual inter-class gardening competition. Each summer the winning class is presented with The Waberthwaite Gardening Shield. Winning the shield at Waberthwaite C E Primary School is just as important as winning sports day! It can get extremely competitive!

This year our inter-class competition was to grow the tallest sunflower. Each class was given 5 seeds to plant and nurture. The pupils planted their sunflower seeds and watched them start to grow. Each class discussed plans, shared age-old family growing secrets and willed their seedling on. The sunflowers were doing well on the classroom windowsills when sadly lockdown occurred and school closed. The pupils were reassured that all the little sunflower plants would be cared for by a member of staff and the competition would still go ahead! Phew!

The same happened with the potatoes that the pupils had planted, luckily these were in potato bags so could be transported from school to be cared for and watered by a member of staff. Regular potato and sunflower updates were shared electronically with the pupils and their families. The sunflowers are still thriving and the winning class will be announced when we all get back together in September.

Luckily for us, the potatoes were ready for harvest as the school opened it’s doors to children of key workers at the start of June, so these children were able to harvest the potatoes. Instead of sharing the crop for our school lunches, like we normally do, the children bagged them up, made posters and shared them with our community who gave us some fantastic feedback – our lockdown potatoes were delicious!!

As we were not going to be able to get together with our school community in May to mark the V E Day 75th Anniversary, we asked pupils, parents and members of our community to help us create a commemorative art display on the Waberthwaite War Memorial, which is just outside our school. Everyone got knitting and crocheting poppies and our art installation was and still is, admired by many.

Throughout our time apart the children and staff have been sharing pictures and news of their home gardening adventures. There’s been landscaping, cultivating, planting, mowing, watering, feeding, harvesting and plenty of healthy eating! We hope you enjoy looking through our photographs…