SEE OUR GARDEN STORY, THE FABULOUS OTHER DESIGNS FROM THIS YEAR AND VOTE FOR YOUR FAVOURITE POCKET GARDENS BETWEEN 5TH AND 13TH JUNE 2021 HERE!

We love living and working in our beautiful, biodiverse Glen. There are such a range of flora and fauna here, often quite undisturbed. We believe that biodiversity is really important for many reasons including:

 

 

• It allows for life cycles to work well. Everything living depends on other living things to flourish and survive. The more flowers and fruit that we plant; the more bug houses, hedgehog hotels, wildflower meadows we make; the less pollution that we create the more our environment will thrive.
• Biodiversity helps the climate. The greater the spread of plant and tree life (and the fauna that supports this), the cleaner the air, soil, and waterways. Our glen!has a huge wealth of lichen, newts, butterflies, bees, birds – thriving in a healthy and clean environment.
• Our Glen is full of working estates and farms. Economic livelihoods here (farming, timber, estate workers) are dependent upon biodiversity and their encouraging it allows for a productive system.
• We also have lots of visitors to the Glen. Encouraging a flourishing ecosystem means that visitors, who come here to hike, camp, birdwatch, fish can enjoy it, and the nicer the area, the better chance that we will continue to keep it well and not litter/pollute.
• Scientifically the more diverse an environment, the greater the opportunity for rare and unusual flora and fauna to be found. Often this range can both be of interest to scientists and can at times be of benefit to us as well.
• Our biodiverse glen promotes the health and wellbeing of the people that live and visit here. A green and healthy environment can improve our mental state, encourages exploration and healthy pursuits such as hill walking that are good for the soul!

We decided to enter Keep Scotland Beautiful’s One Planet Picnic Pocket Garden Competition to be a project for the summer term 2021, tying it in with a larger biodiversity and allotment project in the school. Our initial ideas were:

10th March 2021 INITIAL PLANS SUBMITTED

“My garden has a red spotty fungi bird feeder, a bee house, mint for mint ice cream, tarmac path fencing, roman bridge in the pond, a pond pink roses, red roses, poppies, tulips beside the fence. I’m putting the pond in because I want frogs in because I like frogs. A fungi bird feeder for birds to come more. Flowers to attracted bees and butterflies. Poppies to honour the people who died in the war. Also, in the pond birds could use as a bath.“ 

“My design included: a bird bath, steps, one potato and a bee B&B. to feed the bird bath. I had a pipe with a wheel for making electricity, like the dams in our glen. The steps had nuts on them. The bee B&B is so that we can have more homes for our lovely bees.”

 

 

“I wanted a push and slide greenhouse made out of recycled CD cases. There will be a waterbutt filling up from pipes and a pond below. The greenhouse will have hangers for tools and equipment. There will be troughs for vegetables and over hangers for other plants. The gutters will fill up the pond and maybe the waterbutt.”

 

 

5th April 2021 – WE WERE ANNOUNCED AS ONE OF THE WINNING DESIGNS FOR 2021!!!! …We are starting to build the garden that we had thought up.

17th May 2021 DESIGNING A BUG HOTEL

Our teacher showed us how to use a hand-drill and we recapped on using the saws. We sawed this year’s old x-mas tree and drilled holes in the tree for bees. We took turns with the saw and hand drill. Re-using old for new is so special!

 

We have also this week drafted emails to a number of mentors in our local area that might be able to help and advise us on planting and getting our designs down on wood/compost!

21st April 2021 A MENTOR VISIT

Replies have come back from our mentors and we have written responses out. Lots of useful hints and tips on plants that will do well in our environment and help the bees and butterflies.

One of our mentors, Anthony, came to our school. He talked to us about lots of different things, as well as advising us and the nursery & P1 on the pocket garden ideas.

He is a butterflies and bee expert.  He talked to us about bees and what they do in the garden, pollinating plants.  

There are more than 260 kinds of bees. Male bees are really lazy – they don’t do anything. Females do all the work collecting the pollen.  If the queen bee dies all the bees in that nest would die too. We went on a bug safari and he showed us a mining bee and a cuckoo bee.  We found a rare queen bee – she was called a blaeberry bee. 

 

 

28th April 2021 CONSTRUCTING THE GARDEN

We dug up sand and dug up soil to put in the pocket garden.  Then someone sawed a bit in a pocket garden, we drilled our greenhouse stand and two people put compost – some our own, some peat free from the parent council – in the garden.

 

 

12th May 2021 MAKING OUR STRUCTURES – FENCING, GREENHOUSE AND ROMAN BRIDGE

We glued our picket fence and green house together, after we painted our fence green and we left it to dry.

 

Then we started to make the Roman Bridge out of Glenlyon rocks. We also painted the toad stool head red and white t front of our pocket garden. We also planted 

a potato and got the lower level ready for our seedlings.

19th May 2021 COLD WINDS BLOWING…

It was really cold in May this year – it even snowed – so we planted things out later but also lost a lot of seedlings to the cold. We worked on a bubble wrap ‘cloche’ to warm up the soil and help protect and bring things on. Our wildflower mix will hopefully also come through next year too.

 

26th May 2021 – FINALISING THE GARDEN

So proud to have got there. Our garden has finally been finished and already the bees and butterflies have been visiting (along with the chickens!). Everything working well and flowers just coming through!

Watch our short video about the project below:

To see the full photos from our project, and to vote for your favourite garden between the 5th and the 13th June 2021, please visit The Pocket Garden page on Keep Scotland Beautiful.

 

SPECIAL THANKS TO:

Anthony McCluskey, Helping Hands for Butterflies Project Officer, Butterfly Conservation Scotland

Catherine Lloyd, Tayside Biodiversity Co-ordinator, Tayside Biodiversity Partnership

Heather Hamilton, Project Officer, Highland Perthshire Communities Land Trust

Iain Struthers, Iain Struthers Photography

Jim Jeffrey, Pollinator Strategy & Structural Funds (GI / NCHF), NatureScot

Meggernie Estate and all our friends and families that have supported or helped through this project!