Nearly Ready to Pick!

🌻The beautiful sunflowers grew from seeds dropped from last year's plants and have attracted the bees into our poly tunnel. The bees have been busy pollinating the flowers and our crops have been growing!🌻

As the young folk in our school return tomorrow, I am excited at showing them the result of their care and hard work-from the gardening club to the Eco Committee to the ones who have carried watering cans out before school ended for summer and to our team of summer helpers as well! Your efforts and time have made this happen, Thank you, thank you, thank you!👏👏👏

We will harvest our crops over the next few weeks and they will be counted, weighed, measured and then eaten! The sugar snap peas are still going strong and are sweet and juicy-eat them with the pods on and they are so much sweeter than supermarket ones.

🌻🌻🌻🌻

A surprise from last year!

Aubergine-found out the hard way that they are thorny! That has taken two weeks to get to that size!

Melon crops

Cucumber

Invasive Chinese lantern- not the cucamelon we had ordered!

Melon

Watermelon

Melon

🍆Blooming marvellous! 🍈

Just a quick update-the hot spell has helped this year's crops grow.
A HUGE thank you to our poly tunnel helpers-we have staff, parent and pupil helpers who've come in to water the plants and how the plants have thrived thanks to their time and effort!

As well as this a very kind grandpa has been in weeding the polytunnel over the holidays and he has also mended the damaged cover. It looks great! He also dug over all the beds and cleared them for the gardening club as the soil was solid. Without his hard work there wouldn't have been much growing this year, so thank you so much for all you have done.

I'm sure that the children will be flabbergasted when they see how their plants have grown-a sneak preview is below.
Once again thank you to all involved!
You've all really made a difference!

Cucamelons (I think)

Cucumber and melon patch

Melon

Aubergine in flower

Aubergine beginning to grow

🌲🌳🌳🌲Final Forest School of 2017/18🌲🌳🌳🌲

Wow! Suddenly it's time to bid farewell to woods for another school year. We had a lovely day, guddling about in the stream (I won't name names but someone may have slipped and fallen in the water), climbing on our 'elephant tree' and making bonfire popcorn...

See you in September Auchnacraig Woods!

Successful climber!

Made it!

If at first you don't succeed....

Friendships are formed

Hello from the other side...

Cooking in the woods

That just looks the ideal spot to relax!

Stookie off and nothing will stop her now!

Lunch in the stream

Popcorn woodland style!

Gardening

Linnvale's industrious Gardening Club has been busy, busy, busy again this week! This time, they were planting up all the plug plants purchased by the Eco Committee: aubergine cucumber, cucamelon, tomatillo, squash, melon and watermelon! 


I would like to thank Emily and Zoe's grandfather for digging over all our beds, weeding them and topping them up with our homegrown compost, all his hard work in this unusual hot weather has not gone unnoticed and we appreciate all his hard work. 
Thank you from all of us!

All done for the day!

Our green fingered club.

Watermelon is planted!

Giving the peppers a drink.

Cucumber planted.

Peppers

Finally, thank you to the friends and families of Linnvale who have signed up to help with the poly tunnel-we will be in touch!

😎Getting ready for summer!😎

The Gardening  and Cooking Club added 'painting' to their list of growing skills as they set about getting these benches ready for the Scottish weather! Using house colours to paint the group worked extremely hard to transform the drab, brown benches into colourful seating for our playground.

What an effort! The benches look fantastic! A HUGE thank you to our painting and decorating squad!😃

And they are off!

"Before" shot

All ready to go...

A bench for Clyde

Industrious group

Ta-dah! All done!

Our pupils need YOU!

This is a plea for helpers from our Eco Committee. We would love for mums, dads, aunties, uncles, grandparents to offer a little time to come and help out with our poly tunnel. Despite the vandals' attempts to wreck, we will not be deterred from making a success of it as we are so proud of having this wonderful space and we all enjoy getting outside to use it BUT we can't manage it alone. We need help.

We have a couple of volunteers who have offered to help dig it over and water it and in return, we are giving them space to grown their own crops if they wish. We hope that having more folk around the poly tunnel during out of school hours might stop the unwanted destructive visitors. Sadly, there were more at the weekend and they really went to town-kicking in the shed at 05:45 on Sunday morning then taking a shovel from the shed and trying to smash one of the nursery windows with it. The police have been notified and are getting the footage of the culprits from the CCTV. To say we are upset is an understatement however the Eco Committee has drafted a plan of action. 

Mr Russell has been great at repairing our shed but it is now needing reinforced as the metal is tearing from the force of the kicks it has received-can you help? If so, please contact the school office, leave your details and we will get back to you.
Many thanks,
Linnvale Eco Committee

Our polytunnel when new.

Disappointed by the destruction.

April 2018-the damage

Panels kicked in.

Door kicked in and shovel removed

Booted in panels.

Polytunnel Damage-twice! 😞

The Eco Committee  has just placed an order for "plug" plants  for fruit and vegetable crops for our poly tunnel. so the next step was to inspect the poly tunnel and see what work needed done. You can imagine the dismay and disappointment when we discovered  on Monday that it had been damaged more!
Here are photos from Monday 23rd April:

The polythene around the door frame has been slashed-the door was damaged during the winter.

This hole has been widened.

And then we went out on Friday 27th to check it for traces of any "visitors" and we were sickened to find that they had been back causing more mindless damage

A new hole carved out.

More slashes in the roof.

To give an idea of scale.

Staff will be checking the CCTV footage and any footage of the damage being done will be handed to the police. This damage is so excessive it renders the poly tunnel useless in the winter months now.

The Eco Committee find it hard to understand why folk come and damage children's things. Once again, we are not going to beaten by the actions of a few vandals an we are appealing to parents to come and help at the poly tunnel after school: weeding, watering, pruning or just enjoying the tranquility of the place. Any presence may just keep the vandals at bay.