School Gardening Service
How can we help you?
Up The Garden Bath can help schools/colleges with…
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Creating an allotment
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Developing an existing allotment or garden
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Advice & guidance
We understand that most schools might not have vast resources to start an allotment project. We offer most of our support for free & keep costs down where possible. We ask participating schools to make a small donation to our continued work once our ‘hands on’ support ends - a sort of ‘baton’ to help us move on and help the next school.
What sort of help can we provide?
Foundations
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Building raised beds, rainwater catchers, greenhouses and other features from locally sourced recyclable and ‘upcyclable’ materials (e.g. wooden pallets; baths; old doors, & fly- tipped tyres).
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Organising donations of tools from families and others associated with the School.
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Making compost; we will share how you can make your own for free.
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Harvesting rainwater using tried and testing methods.
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Creating spaces for reading, learning and storage. We will try to upcycle & repurpose anything.
Growing and using food
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Sharing knowledge of how to grow food and flowers; and maybe even the introduction of livestock
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Creating an orchard, planting trees and hedges, sowing wild flower meadows to attract bees to aid pollination locally (if space permits)
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Showing how a school kitchen can use the food produced.
Future proofing
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Helping to make an allotment project sustainable; from volunteers to food production to finances.
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It is not just about the growing of food but is also about ‘growing your own help’- we will help you to connect with staff, parents and the local community to forge a shared responsibility for keeping your project going year in year out.
How long will it take?
In an ideal world, with enough volunteers and materials, a school allotment could certainly be up and running in a single academic year. Of course, many other factors depend on this; e.g. the availability of land and therefore the scale of the new project.
How will students get involved?
Depending on the wishes of the school, children and young people of all ages and abilities can get involved with creating and developing a school allotment. This can be programmed for lunchtimes, after school, through the Duke of Edinburgh Award or the National Citizenship Service schemes and on ‘community days’ at weekends. We take our safeguarding, health and safety and similar responsibilities very seriously and make sure the necessary checks and training are carried out at each place we work.
I’m interested - how can I get started?
At present we focus on supporting pre-schools and primary schools. Up The Garden Bath is currently a small organisation, with only a handful of volunteers and resources, so we have to limit the number of schools we can work with. In time, we aim to work with as many schools who’d like help as possible. This will include setting up a network so that participating schools can share learning, resources and ideas, and be supported after the initial phase of development…we want to create a ’butterfly effect’ so that lots of other schools can benefit from each other’s efforts.
If you are interested in what Up The Garden Bath has to offer we would love to pop over for a visit and talk about how things could work. Even if we can’t offer on the ground help immediately, we will look at other ways in which we can help you get started.
Please click on ‘contact us’ for more information.
