Wildings Summer Club Week 1

What a fantastic week has been had by all! We’ve welcomed around 18 children each day into our Permaculture Allotment site at Noxon Farm, to spend the day engaging in large scale play, natural crafts, and gardening activities.

The day starts with chopping fruit for snacks, then we have a morning circle, do some stretching (kids yoga) sing some songs, play some games, learn about some plants and share feelings with each other. Later on there’s lots of time for free play, in the sand pit, real tool area, making giant marble runs with drain pipes, the rustic seesaw, mud kitchen, and the children love helping to chop vegetables to go in the soup.

We buy all our ingredients (that we don’t pick onsite) from The Dean Forest Food Hub, all organic and local wherever possible, with bulk buys from Essential (workers co-op from Bristol). Most of the children agree that the vegetables taste so much better than supermarket bought - and the tomatoes we picked and ate from our greenhouse were an absolute hit! We involve the children in preparing the food and the table for eating, and they clear away and rinse their bowls too!

This week we put new worms into the wormery so that the food scraps can be turned into amazing potting compost for our next round of seedlings.

There was a dedicated group of children who wanted to dig this week so we grabbed spades, shovels, and buckets and continued to dig the hole for the pond - the children loved this task and worked hard every day some even though the rain until it was finished. We’ve even levelled it out, and can start thinking about what plants to put in it soon!

Afternoons have been more craft oriented with clay, wool crafts, and planting some (old) seeds into modular trays and writing labels.

We always finish the day with tidying away our equipment, and sharing a snack with a closing circle where we play games together, sing songs and share our gratitudes from the day, and for each other and the earth.

We’ve had fantastic feedback from children, staff and parents alike and we are absolutely over the moon for the opportunity to do this work.

Next week we have new seeds coming from The Real Seed Company, a family run enterprise who’s business plan is to put themselves out of business as they give seed saving instructions with every packet! You can find lots of heritage organic seeds there.

So onwards and upwards - enjoy some of the pictures from this weeks HAF (Holiday Activities and Food Scheme) below, and if you think that we should be working in your local school, or you know of a group of children that would benefit from spending a day at The Rewild Permaculture Allotment then get in touch with us.