Homeschool Garden Club - What is feeding our Bees this week ?

This is week 19 of our academic year, and here is what we found in our Orchard Training Homeschool Garden that is in flower and feeding the bees and pollinators.

We have had another week full of weather, we have been able to meet and have a look at the Homeschool Garden and make some choices about what we want to do this year.

The sycamore next door has dropped thousands of seed and as we start hand weeding we are picking these seeds up in handfuls. I think this is the worse year we have had. So, the first thing we need to do is hand weed and take out the seeds, any seedlings and we have found some whips (mini trees about 30cm plus tall we missed last year), which now need to be dug out.

We are going on focus strawberries, we have lots of baby strawberry plants which we are sharing out and there will be teams completing against each other for the harvest total.

Next, we are using our game on the sunflower front. We can't let the Southampton lot win the competition this year!

Finally, we have more learners in the Home School Garden Club interested in eating the produce rather than growing, so we will be focused more on sending produce in to the Orchard Training Cookery Club. So, this year you will see more about recipes than how to grow.

We are using this pictorial evidence to be inclusive, not everyone taking part in the survey can write, very well at the moment, and some have not learnt all about graphs nor the name of the plants, as yet. Once we know what we have, we are going to gather the information together in to charts and graphs and see where we have gaps in the garden over the course of the year. We will be using both our mathematical knowledge and IT skills to make the records present the data. I am looking forward to finding out the results.

The first photograph shows the first bud that will flower on this plant but it has not opened yet, so you can either count it for this week or save it for next week.