RHS Benchmark Scheme Progress

We have continued to work towards RHS level 3 as weather has allowed!! In the picture above, Eve and a (reluctant) Faith are measuring the raised bed. It was 3m20cm by 1m Eve said and she marked it out on a sketch of the bed and then set to work designing the veg planting plan, using symbols for the different veggies that we want to grow, and writing names alongside them. 

We have spent quite a bit of time talking about what we would like to plant, each member of the family has had their own input. I want to grow sweetcorn, courgette and spinach, Dewi wants to grow runner beans and lettuces, Eve wants to grow snap peas and strawberries and Faith wants carrots and radishes. I think that the girl's choices are swayed by previous years when we have grown the same. The veg beds become an outdoor larder for them with the girls harvesting baby carrots and snap peas for a quick munch whenever they feel peckish. It is rare that we ever actually cook any carrots or snap peas from our garden!! As well as talking about what we wanted to plant, we talked about where to put it. I had thought about going through the principles of 'square foot gardening' with Eve but it is fairly technical with spacings for each plant and I didn't want to dim her enthusiasm for planning it out by making it into a chore! Eve was confident that tall plants needed to go at the back of the bed and smaller ones at the front so that they all got adequate sunshine. I only made one tweak to her plan, which was that the sweetcorn plants needed to go in a block rather than a row or they wouldn't produce any ears of corn! I'm going to wait a little to introduce the idea of successional sowing and planting out later in the year in spaces vacated by summer veg, I think that that lesson will happen naturally!

As soon as the temperatures came up a bit more, we planted out the long-overdue sunflowers and snap peas that were still on the lounge windowsill begging for more space! Faith carefully spread hers out by placing the biodegradable pots equal distances apart by eye along the back of the bed.......

She dug a deep enough hole.......

.......made some tears on the bottom of the pot to help the roots make progress downwards.......

....... and carefully firmed the soil around the little pots before watering them in.................

This is Eve working at the front of the bed, carefully planting each pea plant after spreading them out along the bed at equal distances. She has plans to put the nasturtiums (edible flowers for salads etc) in between the peas, and has elected not to stake them as she plans for them to tumble over the side instead. I think this is a good idea and is based on previous year's observations where our pea plants have done very nicely tumbling around without support of any kind!

I am recording this as evidence of section one (some children are participating in the design of the garden), section three (the garden being used as a resources to teach more than one curriculum subject - measuring and areas in working out the size of the bed), and as evidence of the children carrying out gardening skills. 

Taking Part in the RHS Benchmark Scheme

I chatted to the staff at the RHS stand in the Education Show earlier in the month and they were keen for us to sign up and work through the Benchmark Scheme. At first read through it appears VERY school orientated and it is, because it was designed for schools to encourage them to get children gardening. After reading the criteria for each level, I emailed them and double checked that we were OK to take part as a home educating family as the rewards for completing each level are fantastic. They replied that we were fine to continue on to level three which is about where we are at with our gardening, so we're off, I will ask about level four later. They understand that a family won't have the same evidence as a school and asked that I made it clear when I sent the evidence in that we were an HE family so they could review it accordingly! As I like to be an organised bod, I cut and pasted the information for level 3 into a table in a slightly adapted format to suit HE, and left space to jot down notes and plans for gathering the required evidence, most of which can be photographs at this stage. You can download the level three record sheet from google docs, you just need a google account to access it!

Today we re-potted the sunflower and pea seedlings that we planted at the beginning of March, (thinking that they would be out of doors by now). Unfortunately the continued snow and icy temperatures have meant that they are still on the lounge windowsill and struggling in the egg boxes and ice cream cones that they were sowed into. The girls handled the seedlings very carefully and gently and they were re-potted into recycled cardboard pots donated by Granny and Grandpa!

We also sowed some nasturtiums into the same pots, I have tried and failed to grow these edible flowers before but have wanted to bring some more flowers into our veg gardening for colour, variety and pest control purposes, so fingers crossed this time! the big raised bed that we have is perfect for nasturtiums to trail over the edge, they will look pretty.

I am collecting our photographic evidence here as we document our other home ed ventures here!! I am putting today's activities down against section one (raising funds through various channels) as I think donations of resources are in the same vein as fund raising, section two (gardening sustainably) as all our seedlings are housed in biodegradable and recycled/recyclable containers, and section three (skills progressing, and working together) as they repotted seedlings, handling them appropriately and worked as a team dividing jobs and resources to complete the task.

Making a Family Garden Journal

I made this journal in 2009 when the girls were 2 and four, it was a really special way to record how we enjoyed the garden together and what things enthused them and caught their attention. I took photographs of some of the plants as they grew and opened, pointing out the small details to the children and recording when they came up.

We added collage and art that we made at various times of the year and using materials from the garden.

Here we all sat and observed a large and beautiful hosta leaf and all drew our own picture of it to go into the journal.

I added photographs of outdoorsy things the girls enjoyed and some pages have notes jotted all over them, a little like a baby record book of things we did and said.

 This was the front cover, we unearthed it during my recent decluttering and the girls loved going through it and hearing stories and adding their own memories and exclaiming over things!

So we have decided to do one again this year just as Idris really begins to enjoy the garden. I made this journal the following year in 2010 but we never did use it so I will make a new year label and we can use it this year. I'm looking forwards to the girls adding their own notes now that they both write, and we have a new veg bed to plant up since we made some changes to the garden. Idris loves the outdoors, he was making me laugh this evening as he headed off out into the rain in his vest and trousers with a hoe in one hand and a fork in the other. He stopped, pulled a face (at the rain?), came back in and asked that I put his top back on him, which I helped with. He then turned and stumped back off up the garden in the rain with his hoe and his fork!!!

 I made the journal with lots of rainbow pages of all different textures of paper and card, some corrugated cardboard covers, and I cut, embellished and glued one of dewi's cardigans around the the cover. it is nicely felted as I shrank it in the wash - oops, but it does make a great journal with buttons to do it up!!!!

A Little Spring Warmth......

I'm writing this on Thursday evening wrapped in a blanket with a hot water bottle on my feet, after spending the day putting coats and hats on and off, shutting doors after children and keeping active to stop the 14C temperature in my house getting to me!! What a change from Tuesday when it was glorious all day, and the back door stood open all afternoon - the thermometer in the house was still reading 14C but I wasn't interested as I was sitting in the garden in a sheltered spot soaking up the sunshine and feeling rather Springlike!!

The children relished the warmth and rapidly shed outer layers to invent pulley systems with ropes o the climbing frame (which they can't actually play on due to the huge stack of wooden cabin pieces stacked underneath it waiting to be built into said cabin).....

Dewi cracked on with his garden to-do list which pretty much resembles my lists in that as one job is ticked off, another one (or two) is added..... he is cutting pieces to box in the new raised veg planter that has been installed......

Faith got creative with the off cuts - this is a swordfish she tells me...... or a sawdust fish as she assembled it underneath where Dewi was cutting wood..... after getting sawdust in her eye she spent the rest of the afternoon with her goggles on..... wish I'd got a picture of that!!

Idris thoroughly enjoyed digging and didn't seem to have dug up too many things that we actually wanted IN the soil.....

Here is the veg planter - it was helping to move this beast over the fence that ended up in broken rib in January - ahem....... it will be worth it to garden at waist height!! And help to hide the ugly pebble dash garage that next door erected two years ago.....

And what was I busy doing? Well it's a tough assignment but someone has to sit still and keep an eye on everyone!!!

And the weatherman? He says we may be back to this by the weekend - booooooo!

Taking a Break from Childminding.......

Changes are afoot around here - they have been brewing for a while and I am finally embracing them!

The first is that the house purchase we had been working so hard on for the last seven months fell through a couple of weeks ago. There was an access issue that we had done lots of running on to try and solve and it turned out that the owner knew all along that permanent access rights couldn't be granted because she'd had an access dispute with the Council in 2003. That is the third one this year that has gone belly up and after spending fifteen months worth of time and energy and rather a lot of money on NOT moving, we have decided to throw in the moving towel and make this house work for us instead.

I'm happy with that - we've just had to work quite hard on 'resetting' ourselves as for the last seven months it has been "when we move" and "when we have a big kitchen" and "when we have room for the piano" etc etc and have been putting things off and storing things with our thoughts pinned on the future move. With that gone, we are now doing all the things that we've been putting off and moving on all the 'large house' furniture to new homes!

This house needs some re-organisation to make it easier to live in (it's quite a little house for a family) and that takes time, and the obligatory extra mess and chaos whilst we are trying to reduce the mess and chaos. I am startled every time I walk into my bedroom now that I can see the corner again (we are unpacking boxes that have been packed since January!) It looks so much bigger! I am frequenting e-bay, Amazon, Freegle and other sites giving away and selling surplus materials.

My Dad has been and built a wall-mounted high-sleeper bed for Eve who lives in the box room - she is currently camped out in Faith's room whilst I decorate it - it is the most re-purposed room in the house that one, even though it is the smallest, it has been an office, a nursery, then an office again, then a bedroom and hopefully it will stay as it is for a good long while now! The high sleeper means there is floor space for Eve to use and we can fit some furniture in for her clothes, and the desk she would dearly like to have! Poor Faith is feeling a bit plagued as her room is stuffed full of flotsam and jetsom at the minute!

Dewi is busy digging up the garden - a herculean task as there are lots of raised veg beds made from concrete slabs - ready to make a hard-standing for the 'garden room' that I ordered this morning! It will give us much needed additional space at a much smaller cost than extending the house would be! We have lots of plans for what we could do with it but will wait and see how the space feels when it is built!

Part of all the upheaval is that I have decided to step back from child minding for a while. I have struggled to make it work for me for a while now, mainly because of the amount of gear and the amount of children in a small space. My own children were suffering and that isn't why I started to child mind. They have to come first and so it is with a little sadness that I am packing things away and moving on the majority of my resources. I was delighted to gift a local charity The Haven (it houses women and their children securely when in desperate need due to domestic violence etc) with a people carrier stuffed full of my highest quality resources from a wooden kitchen to sensory blocks to baby equipment, you name it, I hope they get a lot from it. Some has been sold and there is more to go. I am stunned at how much I have amassed over the last four years and I don't miss any of it! I have worked very hard to build my business and support others but it is time to take some space from it - I am retaining my registration though!

Autumn Planters

We made these Autumn planters last week. I found the ceramic pots at the pound shop, and the plants came from the supermarket. We put one Heather in each pot and then some tiny plug plants of citrus coloured Pansies and Primroses. They are grouped together here on my bird table (more like an albatross table, it is made from scaffold planks!). They need to be above ground level so that Idris doesn't 'unplant' them several times! They will wing their way off to various people this coming week, one home with my baby mindee and one at my parent's house as a welcome home present for when they arrive home from a long visit to my brother in Canada. My little mindee aged 11 months had a fabulous time doing these. I've been trying to encourage her to put things into pots as well as take them out and when the compost came out she got the idea and chuckled away as she put handfuls of it in. Idris was more creative with the compost than that.... isn't he always?!!