You may have seen my blog post a few weeks ago about how my Water Orton Wildlife (WOW!) Club won £100 worth of plants after entering a competition to design a Happy Habitat that was displayed at Gardeners’ World Live. We went to G-Scapes in Lichfield and choose a selection on insect friendly plants to renovate a rather sad area at school that already had several Buddleias and other nectar rich plants.
The area looked pretty sad as the weeds had grown through the liner, a lot of stuff was overgrown and it looked pretty sad. I needed a team of volunteers… and that I got! This is a team of year 5 and 6 pupils, all who volunteered to help for an afternoon… little did they know what they had let themselves into!
First, I got them to clear all the weeds out… and there were almost as many weeds as there were plants…
Once we had done that, I positioned the new plants and groups of children dug the holes….. well attempted to! Many of these kids have never done anything like this and were ready to give up after about 5 mins! Lots of encouragement and a little help, we soon had suitable sized holes and they planted all the super stuff we had bought.
I had another team filling two wheelbarrows with bark chipping we had delivered some time ago into school and this was spread over the bed and around our new additions.
In just an hour and a half, we had transformed the area! I plan on further developing this area next year and will be putting some habitat panels up that John Little made for my stand at Gardeners’ World live. It will hopefully become a haven for insects and a learning resource for the school.
Well done kids!
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