June has been a busy month for us especially in the Eco garden. We have been working on our Food for Life Plant and Share project, growing our organic potato, strawberry  and carrot plants outdoors in the summer sunshine and we have had great success with them. Classes have been growing vegetable and herb plants on their windowsills in class and  today they were all taken to The Simon Community building in Pollokshields.  They will be planted and grown on in the garden there and harvested soon for cooking. We also shared some Chives with the Hidden Gardens in Pollokshields who have been growing them on for us and have now shared them with The People’s Pantry in Govanhill, some of whom are members at the Hidden Gardens. In these photos, you can see our chives being received at the Hidden Gardens by Andrea and by the People’s Pantry. You can also see pupils from our school at The Simon Community in Pollokshields after just dropping off all our potato, carrot, bean, strawberry, rocket and lettuce plants from our Plant and Share project. We hope that next year we can continue to grow fruit and vegetables and share our produce with the local community.

Chive plants grown by Primary 3 were shared with Andrea and Rhona at The Hidden Gardens and The People’s Pantry Govanhill.

St. Albert’s pupils delivering vegetable, fruit and herb plants from our Eco garden to The Simon Community, Pollokshields.

Also, this week our wonderful janitor Mr Moss, transformed a large  branch that we found in the school grounds into a habitat for Solitary Bees  by drilling centimetre wide holes into it for them to make homes in. Pollinators, including solitary bees, carry out a vital role in pollinating our crops, and also flowers and trees. In some parts of China pollination is already being undertaken by hand using paintbrushes because there are no bees left to do it naturally. We used to think that honey bees were the biggest contributors to crop pollination but that simply isn’t the case today, all types of bees are important.  He embedded the post into the centre of our older wildflower patch where we have plants such as Perennial Cornflower, Red Campion, Lavender, Poppies and Shasta Daisies to provide them with nectar. Here you can see him with his creation. You can also see our finished  bug hotel and the old recycling bins that were adapted to use as wheelbarrows for carrying

Mr Moss the janitor with our Solitary Bee habitat

The bees can land on the stones and drink water in our bee watering tower made from and old plant pot and dish.

Our new bug hotel which will provide homes for bees and many other insects.

Our recycled bin wheelbarrows can be used to transport canes, pots, plants and other gardening items wherever we need them.

Primary 5 had put in a lot of hard work this year to create another wildflower patch  so as to increase the plant biodiversity in our Eco garden and provide more nectar for pollinating insects. They had calculated the dimensions of the size of the new flower bed they were going to make so they could edge it with all the edging stones we got from Gumtree. Then earlier in the year they had dug out the grass, laid the edging stones and sowed a mixture of wildflower plants. Here you can see the wildflowers are in bloom and are providing food for many types of bee as we found out in a recent bumblebee survey at this site.

Primary 5 undertaking a bee survey at our new wildflower patch.

Our new wildflower patch contains plants such as Borage, Lacy Phacelia, Catchflies and Herb Robert which have been a hit with the local bee population and especially Carder Bees and White and Buff tailed Bumblebees.

Bumblebee collecting nectar from Lacy Phacelia.

Close ups of the wildflowers.

Here you can see the results of the Bumblebee survey P5 undertook at the new wildflower patch in our Eco garden.

As part of our School Grounds topic, the Eco Committee ran a survey for P4-7 pupils to find out about what the pupils would like to see in their playground. We have been working with the Parent Council of St. Albert’s this year and they have taken the children’s wishes into consideration. This summer there will be members of the local community who will be working in our grounds to make these dreams a reality. Click on this link below to see  the results of the survey:

Results of Upper school ground survey P4 to P7

As part of our Eco Schools topic on Biodiversity, P7 pupils had used the Seek app from iNaturalist to survey the plant and trees in all areas of our school grounds to create a database of plant life.  They recorded all species names an locations on an Excel document on their iPads. These results have been added to a map of our grounds as a record for the future. The plants we have added to our school grounds this year were highlighted in yellow as a way of measuring change. We can update this document over the years to see how the biodiversity is thriving or being affected by climate change. Here you can see the many species we have in our grounds if you click on these words and the blue link that appears. We were surprised at the sheer variety of plant biodiversity in our grounds.

biodiversity data st Alberts grounds updated FINAL

As School Grounds is one of the topics we have been working on for our current Eco journey, we decided to get involved in a food growing project called Food for Life. Miss Brooks sent off an application for a grant to buy compost, pots and vegetable seeds in order to grow vege that wee could share with our community. We decided to involve all the children in the school in planting and growing some vegetables  and herbs that we could use in cooking so that we could share some of our produce with The Simon Community in our local area and the gardeners at The Hidden Gardens in Pollokshields. Our grant application was successful and we have planted potatoes, carrots, chives, courgettes and beans in our classrooms and in the Eco garden. These are growing well (despite an attempt by vandals recently to overturn all the plant pots with carrot seeds in them in the Eco garden) and we hope to be able to harvest our produce before the end of term and make soup which we can share with The Simon Community at a celebration event in our school. Here are some photos of our vegetables and herbs growing. Here you can see some of our seedlings growing on classroom windowsills and some of the vegetables we have planted in the Eco garden.

You may remember back in February that the Eco Committee had decided to try and tackle our litter problem by signing up to Terracycle’s crisp packet recycling scheme. This was because crisp packets are always showing up in large quantities in our litter surveys.

We started out by collecting crisp packets after playtime and lunchtime when pupils would bring their crisp packets into class and deposit them in a bag there to be collected later and taken to a central point in the hall. This wasn’t working as well as we had hoped, as pupils would forget to bring their empty packets indoors.

So we decided to put plastic bins outside in the playgrounds and position them beside the regular mushroom bins where most rubbish is supposed to go. We also added buckets for unwanted fruit or fruit peels so that they could be taken to the large compost bays in the Eco garden. Monitors were appointed to ensure the bins were put out before the morning playtime. At the end of lunchtime, the fruit bins are emptied into the large compost bays in the Eco garden and the crisp packets are taken to a central collection bin in the school hall.

This has been a more successful way to cut down  our litter.  Miss Brooks recently emptied out the large central collection bin in the school hall and stacked all the  crisp packets collected since the end of February in piles of ten packets and these were arranged in rows of ten to make counting easier. There were 1053 crisp packets in total. That is 1053 crisp packets that would probably have ended up dropped in the playground, blown into the street and swept down drains and out to sea where it would add to the plastic pollution problems for marine creatures. We also have a regular supply of fruit peels and apple cores going into our compost bays now, adding to the grass cuttings,  waste paper, cardboard and twigs which we can use in the future in our Eco garden to save money buying compost from outside suppliers. In our last litter survey we saw a drop in the number of crisp packets on the playground or caught up in bushes. The next item we want to tackle at source, that keeps appearing in large numbers in our litter surveys is plastic bottles.

Last week, P1a got busy making some bird cake to help feed the many types of birds that visit our school grounds. They mixed fat and bird seed together and filled spare mugs with the mixture. The leftover mixture was added to a large bowl. They had collected sticks from the school grounds and pushed these into the bird cake in the mugs to make perches for the birds to land on when feeding. Then the mugs were put into a freezer to harden the mixture. The mugs were hung on branches by their handles  near to  the trees where we have put up our new bird boxes to encourage birds to nest there and the  bird cake from the bowl was placed  on the grass for the birds that prefer to feed from the ground.