Holy Trinity Primary School Environmental Garden: "The person who says that it cannot be done,

should not interrupt the person doing it"

A Chinese proverb.

Recent fine weather has meant that the garden group has been able to tackle a lot of outstanding jobs. Wildlife too, has not been standing still and overnight the shallow end of the pond was full of frog spawn. A lot of the tadpoles will be predated as they grow into small frogs and hopefully leave the pond to develop. Twenty nine adult frogs were counted at one stage.

A few of the frogs


The mass of frog spawn.

The garden has four tit type nest boxes but one afternoon both Great tit and Blue Tit were investigating the same nest box. The Great Tit will win for sure as it is a lot larger. The Blue Tits can use the box by the Woodland Walk where they usually nest.

Male Great Tit investigating the nest box

Minutes later a male Blue Tit was also investigating

The group were lucky to have a contact who had some rotting manure for free and a quick visit was made to collect twenty bags. The compost should have been dug in at the end of the last year but the weather was not good for that. The manure has now all be spread and dug in on the vegetable beds.

The dung heap has a good view of the Fleet!

All loaded up

Spreading over the large edible garden bed

The World War 2 bed was also treated

It was also time to trim the Willow Classroom back to shape. Over a year the willow can grow 6 to 8 feet so this needs to be trimmed back to encourage growth lower down.

The Willow Classroom regains its' shape

In the greenhouse one of the Echeveria plants has developed three flowering stems. This is the first time that this plant has flowered and we await the flowers to see what they look like

The Echeveria plant

Around the garden other flowers have appeared. The beautiful Iris reticulata has flowered. The blooms unfortunately do not last long.

Iris reticulata

In detail

The area containing the class beds also needed looking at as the planks which had served for many years were finally rotting. We sourced four very heavy untreated oak sleepers to replace them. The sleepers should last for many years.

The new sleepers

The old rotting planks

Moving the heavy sleepers

Almost finished

Job done!

The sleepers will be left for a week to settle before they get bedded in properly. The membrane and bark chips will then be back-filled

A new addition to the garden has been "Compo". He appeared overnight and stands guardian to the property.

It is hoped that the other redundant compost bins can be used in a similar way. The garden group have got their thinking caps on!

The last of the daffodils to open and flower


Spring Cellandines in the pond area

The fossil signs have also been fixed to the Portland Stone mounts. It is hoped that pupils will learn from them and be able to take rubbings as well.

Finally after many attempts to catch the intruder in the pond a stealth attack was made last friday afternoon and met with success. The goldfish has been removed from the wildlife pond. It has gone to a good home nearby!