Landscove School Young Farmer’s Club

The sun is shining, the birds are singing & our convoy of cars gets us to the farm by 3:40. Final footwear changes & then over to the Field Kitchen to meet Darran & a photographer from The Western Morning News. Why do journalists always want to know how old everyone is? Never mind. Just don’t want him to write “Head teacher, 52 & looking every year of it ……”  Darran gets on with the introductions. The photographer gets artistic with trowels & little plants & silhouettes etc!

Then we all move across to our plot. It looks huge, well….quite big enough anyway. How on earth are we going to prepare, plant & tend an area of approx 400 square metres? I know that the kids are enthusiastic but….. is Darran having a joke? We have a bit of a talk about why soil needs to be nice & crumbly & how we are going to divide the area into 4 bits. One for potatoes (high fertility), one for root veg (low fertility), one for brassicas (high fertility) & the last one for legumes (fertility building). We’ve all got a lot to learn & the first thing is probably to tell the difference between a legume & a brassica. Darran soon sorts this out – one is to do with things like peas whilst the other is things like cabbage. Easy! But which is which? Decide not to worry, the kids will soon work it out.

Anyway, time to get on with some planting so… back to the Field Kitchen where Darran has a range of seeds for the kids to plant in seed trays. The idea is that they make their choices, plant them (following the rule that the hole should be twice the depth of the seed) then take them home & nurture them so that they will be ready to plant out when we return after the belated Easter holiday. All went well & we all learned that a biro can perform a duel function with ease. First you write your name on the seed tray then you turn the biro upside down & use it as a perfectly sized dibber to help you to get your seed to just the right depth! I wonder if Alan Titchmarsh knows that one?

Anyway, before we know it it’s 4:45 & the parents are arriving to take their children home. And what have we planted? Gardener’s Delight tomatoes, Lymnanthes poached egg plants, Defender courgettes, Sunburst squash, sweetcorn, Alan Titchmarsh organic cucumbers, Soleil courgettes & early Jalapeno chilli peppers. Not bad eh?

Oh, nearly forgot…. Jodie also helped out. Jodie is great. She is a Landscove “old girl” who left the school about 13 years ago. Now she is a grown up who works for Plymouth Council but is really interested in projects involving children & plants & growing & stuff. When she heard about our club she decided that she must take part. In fact she is so keen that she utilised her flexi-hours arrangement to start work today at 7:00 a.m. so that she could be back at the farm to help us. Isn’t that fantastic?

Finally, mustn’t forget to mention the cake. Don’t know how he does it but Darran manages to persuade someone in the kitchen to bake a cake especially for us every week. “What sort of cake” you are probably wondering? Well, I’m not actually sure, just know that it was delicious & soft on the inside & gently crunchy on the outside. The only bad bit was that my piece fell on the ground, but it was ok once I’d brushed the dirt off. Must have been good organic dirt as I’m still here to write the blog some 4 hours later!

You know, this has probably been the best hour & a half that I have had doing school stuff for ages. Even more fun than the mountain of paperwork that I attempt to climb every day!

Next update on Tue 22nd April when we’re all back from the vacation.

We ran our first Landscove School Young Farmer’s Club last summer. It was organised by Peter & Darran down at the farm & we are just about to begin this year’s event. Twelve Tuesdays from April to July when we all become “farmers” for an hour. I wonder how many Head Teachers do that every week?

After a lot of planning & other shananakins we’re nearly ready to start. By Friday (the official closing date 28th Mar) 18 children had signed up. This morning, 1st Apr (surprise, surprise) there were 25 who wanted to do it, so I’ve had to create a waiting list. Has farming ever been so popular? Anyway I have to go now to get organised – wellies at the ready & off we go! Hope all the mums turn up to provide the taxi power we need to get to the farm – Riverford Organic Vegetables, a mile away from the school.

Landscove C of E Primary School nestles into a hill next door to St Matthew’s Church & just above the settlement of Woolston Green. It is a glorious agricultural area where the turning seasons are obvious to all who have the privilege to live or work here. The school contains 106 delightful children aged between 4 & 11 and is split into 4 classes. The school building is a mixture of the old & the new & has a charm all of its own. The atmosphere is very positive & the caring staff do their best to nurture the natural talents developing within the children whilst providing a broad & balanced education to “tool them up” for the ever changing world in which they are growing up.

All who work & learn here are proud to part of this special little school & participate in the mini adventures that we plan into the life of the school.

And so we come to our school “Young Farmer’s Club”, not quite like a real Young Farmer’s Club. (I know more about these because my sister’s grown up kids enjoy a very full social life with their local group in West Yorkshire.) However, I decided it was a catchy name for an after school club that provides an opportunity to link the children to the rich soil of Devon each week whilst they grow vegetables & salad that will be harvested & enjoyed before we all break up for the summer hols in July! 

We all ”catch” a large proportion of the dietary habits that we will have for life during our childhood days. This project is also an attempt to make sure that we sow the seed of the importance of fresh fruit & veg within our children. We want to understand more about the process of food production & encourage them on the path towards healthy lifestyles when they are older. 

I should also mention here that we are a healthy School. Yes, this is now official because we recently achieved the Devon Healthy School Award. We also serve the best school dinners in the world. Yes…. it’s true! I know because I eat them & I don’t believe that any school anywhere could do better. These are organic & cooked by Fiona who deliversthem piping hot from Riverford every day. They are so good we won the Soil Association School Dinner of the Year Award in 2005 & Jamie Oliver actually presented us with our prize at the Good Food Show at the NEC! It was very exciting!

Anyway, that’s enough for now, time I attacked the paper mountain again!

I have started the blog so that I can share our adventures with anyone who’s interested. I’ve never done one of these before (never even looked at one actually, just heard them mentioned on the radio & thought it sounded like an interesting idea) & hope that I can learn how to put pictures on it & make it an interesting read. It will tell you what we get up to & will also be “peppered” with my own random assortment of thoughts & ramblings as the project develops. Hope you enjoy it  whilst learning more about the spirit of our special little school. Robin Smith.