Surrey Sculpture Trail

Photographing 'The Dinner Guest' at Wisley

On Thursday we took forms L6A and L6B to the Royal Horticultural Society Gardens at Wisley.

There they followed the Surrey Sculpture Trail - choosing their favourite sculpture to use as the inspiration for poetry which they will write during the coming weeks, under the guidance of their respective English teachers Mr Murphy and Mrs Waite.  They will then use their ICT skills to present their final poem in the most creative fashion they can.

It was a beautifully warm and sunny day and the sculptures nestled serenely into their surroundings.  The gardens looked simply stunning.

L6A drawing in the Glasshouse

As well as following the sculpture trail pupils also spent time in the magnificent Glasshouse sketching the plants.

Many of the class brought digital cameras, which gave them the opportunity to take some really interesting photographs which we will use to experiment with HDR and Photoshop techniques later this term.



One group stopped by the lake just as a heron caught a fish - with any luck they've captured that too on camera.



 

Slugging it out

During the very hot weather this week we have been looking after our little seedlings very carefully. We have been making sure they get enough water and because they are still quite vulnerable we have been 'putting the seedlings to bed every night' with fleece and poly covers.

L6B sketching in the Potager Garden

On Wednesday the pupils spotted our first slug - which was closely followed by two more sightings at breaktime!  As our Potager Garden is organic we are not using any pesticides.  On Mr Crawford's advice we put copper wire around the raised beds to deter the slugs:  apparently they don't like copper. This seems to have done the trick as we haven't seen anymore slugs this week and there are no bite marks on our vegetables. Hurray! 

The pupils have also been taking advantage of the fine weather and nearly all art classes have been outside sketching and painting in the Garden.

Duncan painted one of the raised beds

It is amazing to see how quickly our seedlings are growing. Some have produced small flowers in just one week. Forms 1R and 1S have been busy collecting information and photographs for their Garden Journals as well as preparing traditional wooden plant labels for the garden to replace the modern plastic ones we have at present.

Lets hope for more fine weather next week!

 

Potager Garden - Planting

At last. The week everyone has been waiting for. The Rocket Gardens seedlings have arrived.

Down in Cornwall, Mike Kitchen and his team carefully selected and packed a huge variety of vegetables and herbs for us. They also got caught up in the whole spirit of our RHS Campaign for Gardening in Schools and offered us amazing value for money (with a not inconsiderable discount).

Plus everything from Rocket Gardens is organic. Thank you Rocket Gardens.

The pupils managed to plant everything within 24 hours of the seedlings being delivered. The weather was kind to us too!

Hopefully all the vegetables will survive, and we'll have healthy salad bowls on the tables in the Dining Hall before Christmas.

This is how we spent our time this week :




A larger version of this video can be viewed on our Vimeo Channel
www.vimeo.com/channels/mlcreative

Thank You

Sometimes it's nice just to be able to write a post in which we say 'Thank You'. This is the first of such entries.

Firstly to our local garden centre Garsons Farm in Esher. They have sponsored our Autumn Vegetable Garden by providing £250.00 for us to spend in store. We've already used some of the money to buy the soil for our potager garden and some new planters. Garsons delivered everything to us on Friday and the children have filled the raised beds ready for planting.

Alison Jones is their hugely knowledgable "Planteria Supervisor" who spent ages advising us about the best position for all our 200 vegetable seedlings.
Ben Thompson is the Marketing Manager at Garsons and has been a terrific support. A representative from Garsons will be visiting Milbourne Lodge in the near future to see how we are progressing. Thank you to all the team at Garsons Farm www.garsons.co.uk

Last week I found a wonderful online garden planner and plant database. It's called GrowVeg. I contacted them via email for customer support late one evening and was astounded to receive a reply from Jeremy at GrowVeg within minutes. He continued the dialogue via email for the next 48 hours until the programme was successfully up and running and we had 'tweaked' everything to match our requirements. It transpires that Jeremy Dore has been a teacher too : so knows how much planning goes into introducing software into the classroom.

Pupils are now planning the planting of the individual vegetables using the GrowVeg Garden Planner. Thank you to the GrowVeg team for their patience and advice - and for a wonderful programme. www.growveg.com

Preparation and Planning

This week pupils have analysed the soil and constructed the raised beds for their vegetable garden.

The weather has been wonderful: warm, sunny and dry every day.

Max, in Form 1, explained how his class have been involved:

Our garden looks quite bare at the moment, but that's because we have to do a lot of preparation to make sure our vegetables grow properly. In Art, we used Google Earth to see the area we are going to plant, and then talked about which vegetables would grow best. We need both sun and shade because different plants like different things. We measured our plot.


The plot is really good. It has thousands of worms which clean the soil. In ICT we have an outdoor camera which will film our plot as we work on it. Then the film can be speeded up for us to watch. That will be amazing.

I can't wait to work on our garden again. Everyone is working together. I'm excited because the plants are going to arrive next week

The project launch

With the Centenary of Milbourne Lodge School just months away, this seemed the perfect time to launch our latest, and most ambitious , whole school project to design and build a Centenary Garden within the school grounds. The project is led by Mrs Bawden, Head of Art and Mrs Cary, Head of ICT who will be encouraging pupils not only to design, cultivate and care for the garden but also to document their work using sketches, paintings, photographs, time-lapse photography, film making and this collaborative blog as well as a variety of other IT related resources.


Milbourne Lodge has joined the RHS Campaign for School Gardening which encourages and supports schools to create and actively use their school garden as a classroom for learning. Pupils will be aiming to achieve all five benchmarks in the scheme by the end of this Autumn term.

Already, just a few days into the new term, pupils have been introduced to the project and have chosen the first of two locations – for a vegetable garden (known as a Potager Garden) – as well as preparing the soil, and building the raised beds.


This marks the start of what will be a hugely exciting campaign : and we have been thrilled to learn that many pupils are already pretty knowledgeable about the subject of gardening, and actively involved in growing fruits, vegetables and flowers at home or in their own allotments.