At Bowmore Primary School, we have been working hard on our amazing garden project. It was admired by Mr Don McAllister and he invited us to attend this conference. All the head teachers of Argyll and Bute were going to be there – we were very excited. We had to get up in time for the 7:00am on Monday 10th March to catch the ferry to Kennacraig. We met Mrs MacDougall and Ms Gilbert at Port Ellen. Our parent helper, Mr Swarbrick drove us there as he was coming with us.
We travelled to the Youth Hostel in Oban. We (Jack, Charlotte, and Lindsey) slept in the car except Ollie. Once we arrived in Oban, we got our rooms and walked up to the Corran Halls. When we were inside, we signed in and went to set up our stall. We used extremely cool velcro blobs to fix our display. This showed our garden project from the start to where we are now. We have tackled and cleaned up two big ‘jungle’ areas and transformed them into a rockery and a brilliant raised bed area.
We used our maths skills to help us. We calculated area and perimeter to help plan our raised bed measurements. We drew our plans to scale (more maths!) then showed them to the school who had to vote for their favourite rockery design and their favourite raised bed plan. Jack’s design won the rockery plan and Hannah won the raised bed design.
We then worked extremely hard! We weeded, dug lots, shifted tons of woodchips, sawed, hammered, drilled and the result was amazing.
We explained our project to all the head teachers at the conference who were impressed. One head teacher is going to phone us to get more details because she would like her P6/7 class to do something like this.
Before we got the 6.00pm ferry back to Islay on the Tuesday night, we had time to buy our seeds and plants, ready to plant when we go to school on Wednesday.
We are so pleased and proud to have achieved so much and have lots of people say positive things about us! We would like to thank all those people who are helping us on our project – especially Mr Swarbrick, PC Hutchison and Mr Carter. We are looking forward to a productive and colourful garden this summer.

Oliver Jorgensen, Jack McDonald, Lindsey Swarbrick and Charlotte McMillan P7 Bowmore Primary School