Unfortunately our small garden areas do not benefit from good soil. Our Wildlife Garden in particular has a heavy clay soil which we have spent some years improving. Many bags of builders rubble were dug out and removed before we could begin to develop our mini orchard and allotment bed.

Composting has become an important activity for our Eco Team and Allotment Club. We currently have two free standing composters and one tumbling composter in our Eco Garden and we are planning to develop a further dedicated composting area.

It takes two to tumble.

Summah and Sian are responsible for the school's composting and make lunchtime collections of waste fruit and uncooked vegetables. Tea bags are collected from the staff room and garden waste is added by the Allotment Club.

Cool Composting

"My friend Sian and I are the school's composting team. It's our job to collect the fruit peelings and left over salad from the pupils at lunch time. We must not put hot, cooked food in the composting bin. We have 3 composting bins. Here is the tumbling composter, you have to spin it so that the contents get churned about. We also have two free standing bins with twist lids.

We have to put the fruit and the salad in the compost bins every afternoon at 13.00. We can also put ripped up egg boxes, eggshells, vegetables and weeds. The Allotment Club work in our Eco Garden, they clear all the weeds and yucky soil out of the flowerbeds and put it into one of the free standing compost bins.

We are getting a new composting area soon because our bins are nearly full. It will be mine and Sian's job to move all the compost into the new area. We are looking forward to getting really, really dirty!"

Summah year 5

One of our original composting bins.

How to make 'Super' compost

It is important that you achieve a good balance of ingredients in your composting or it can become for example, too acidic. This was the problem we encountered, so to help counteract this we decided to add (amongst other things) torn up egg boxes.

How many egg boxes has your class collected?

Wormeries are another excellent way of disposing of food waste and a fascinating project for the children to observe.

Pictured here is one of our pupils with a small wormery he built. He wanted to observe the worms that he had dug up from our Wildlife Garden, dragging fallen eaves into the layers of soil and sand. He kept the soil moist and the sides covered and over the next few weeks watched the worms slowly mix the layers of soil together.

Click here to view a larger copy of the wormery report.

Every Autumn our Leaf Squad swing into action collecting bin bags full of fallen leaves from our school playground areas.

These are then chopped up and returned to the bin bags where they are kept watered throughout the winter. The resulting leaf mulch can be used as a soil improver the following Spring and helps retain moisture in the soil during prolonged dry spells.

Click here to view a report from the year 3 Leaf Squad.

NEW LEAF MULCH CONTAINERS

Our composting has been so successful that we needed more space in order to expand. The children were allowed to clear an area of waste ground behind the staff car park and we had sufficient recycled timber left over from our Eco Garden to enable us to construct these two large leaf mulch containers. The children are now involved in fundraising for some more closed composters to take our kitchen and garden waste.

23rd of July 2007

Allotment Club holiday activity: Moving the compost heap!

Our free standing composters had to be relocated to our new dedicated composting area as our green house is to be resited in the corner of our Eco garden.

Two of our Allotment Club members joined Mrs Browne and Mr Jasper during their summer holidays for a days shoveling!

Phew! This is going to take us hours!

Better get shoveling.

These items were found in our composters during the move. Plastic and polystyrene do not decompose.