Monday, September 10, 2012

Herb Spiral in St.Finian's NS, May 2012


In May, we continued with our ongoing school garden programme at St. Finian's NS in Finglas. This time we  built a herb spiral in place of the old herbacious border that the school wanted removed from the front of the school. With 4th class we built a very magical spiral bed into which we planted a huge variety of herb plants, from medicinal to colourful to culinary herbs, rosemary, sage, thyme, marigolds etc.

April 2012, The Outdoor Classroom, redesigning the school garden!

It had been a while, but I went across to Tullamore today to work with Geraldine O'Toole from Sonairte. We did a school garden design day for the school. We worked with 4th class for the day, bringing them through the whole process of redesigning their school grounds from the perspective of making it into an Outdoor Classroom. so we went through the possible elements - vegetable patch, woodland, pond, orchard, fruit area, wild area etc, then we went outside and mapped the grounds, measuring the buildings and green spaces and auditing the site so we knew what the school already had onsite. Then in the afternoon we returned to the classroom and together with the kids we came up with the design that you see here in the picture, a fabulous 10-year plan for the school to work towards. We already made some preliminary plans to come back and start building the vegetable patch in a few weeks!

Progress being made at Piper's Hill, April 2012


The ladies are making huge progress in the new school garden we're building for the students down at Piper's Hill School in Naas, Co. Kildare. I'm working with a parent's group to develop the garden, and it has turned out to be an all women's group, but let that not deceive you, there has been trojan work done by the ladies, during April we built the beds for and planted up the herb and fruit areas in the garden. We planted raspberries, currants, strawberries, and rhubarb to name a few!