The families of our Year 6 leavers know how much our gardening means to Wiggonby and have kindly given the school these wonderful planters, filled with beautiful flowers. Thank you so much! 

The strangest thing happened! We acquired a new addition to our animal habitats: a bat box! The same week, at the swimming pool, Mrs Walsh found a small, cold, wet bat in the sink in the changing rooms. The bus driver kindly agreed to stop at Knoxwood, the animal rescue centre, as we were driving past. Coincidentally, we have been raising money this year for Knoxwood with our Eco Council, so we can support the great work they do for wildlife. 

We have grown some fabulous lettuces this year in our raised planters, and have been enjoying them at lunchtimes at the salad bar! The other big successes this year have been the strawberries and the rhubarb. 

Our youngest children and Mrs Jones have planned and made this fabulous sensory garden in the EYFS garden. Click through the pictures to see each stage of the journey, including planning, making a pebble fountain, planting, maintenance and testing out different slug deterrents! Well done EYFS! 

In case you were in any doubt, Mrs Morrey and Class 3 children also spotted the rabbit while they were painting the shed. They have named it Clover. ☘️ 

Class 2 children have been inspired to write newspaper articles about the plants being nibbled, at Wiggonby, and diary entries by the ravenous rabbits!

Thank you Crofton plants for all the lovely leeks! We look forward to eating them in our school dinners in the autumn… if we can keep the rabbits away! Thanks also to Mrs Pearson for collecting them for us. 

Our Class 3 WOW! team (Wiggonby on Well-being) made this lovely display to celebrate 60 years of Britain in Bloom. Gardening is fabulous for well-being, and so they created these lovely little plant pots with wildflower seeds for their enterprise project, promoting well-being, gardening and conservation. The WOW! team have been selling their smoothies, bookmarks and wildflower seed pots in school, in local businesses and at Wigton market, and have staggeringly made over £1000! A fantastic achievement and a brilliant way to spread awareness throughout the community of the steps that we can all take to improve our well-being. 

The garden club chose to celebrate 50 years of Cumbria Tourism by celebrating two local businesses that are part of our Wiggonby family. The Wellington Inn and Caravan park, and The Aikton Arms and their luxury camping pods. The children created these lovely planters to celebrate their excellent achievements with the local community and spread some joy! 

We had a really productive garden club session working on our celebration of 50 years of Cumbria Tourism. It was interrupted by a thunderstorm with a lot of hailstones! 

Class 3 have been making and positioning these lovely labels so that we can all identify the trees and plants that we have on our school site. 

We have realised that a small amount of the compost we have used is not peat free. As an Eco School, we support the use of peat free compost. Click on the link to read about why harvesting peat is bad for the environment, and will be completely banned by 2030. Next year, we will be using some compost from our compost bins, which we have been busy filling. We even have a compost bin for our school dinner scraps! If you would like to start composting at home, it’s easy to do, and really makes a difference. Instead of bulky food scraps going in your rubbish bin, they can soon be recycled into lovely compost that you can use in your gardens. Click here to purchase a discounted composter from Cumbria county council via Great Green Systems.  https://www.greatgreensystems.com/cumbria-council/

Many plants that we grew from seed last year are flowering beautifully! The hostas are enormous and the strawberries are growing too!

Thank you for our new paving slabs in our container garden. 🪴 

Children in our garden club planted the new plants from Road End Nursery in our well-being sensory garden, and look at this beauty! Our well-being garden is in daily use, and children love to feel the textures of the different leaves, see the beautiful flowers and sniff the herbs. Gardening and being outside in nature is brilliant for everyone’s mental well-being. 

The younger children have been using iPads to identify all of the different plants and trees that we have on site. The older children are going to make labels so that we can all learn the names of the plants that grow at Wiggonby.

The hanging baskets are looking FABULOUS, and the rhubarb never stops growing! Thank you to Mr Pearson for putting up hanging basket brackets around the school. 

Mr Brooks has given each class a new planter and a new greenhouse. Mr Hill very, very kindly gave up his time to assemble all four planters (and also our new play ladders!) and he did a wonderful job. Thank you so much Mr Hill!

Children in class 2 love it when ‘Gardening’ is on the timetable. They have been busy bees, weeding, planting, repotting and composting.

Wiggonby now has four litter pickers that you can borrow! Let us know if you would like to borrow one, and you can make a difference to our local environment. 

Children in our every-expanding garden club have really used their green fingers and artistic talents to create these beautiful hanging basket displays, and to refresh the pots at the front of school.

Children have been learning about bees through English, science and art. They have written non-chronological reports about bees, have made branching keys to identify different minibeasts and have drawn fabulous pictures of bees too. 

Thank you to Road End Nursery in Great Orton for the plants, compost and also the good advice about some new and interesting plants for our sensory garden. Thank you Road End Nursery! If you haven’t visited Road End, we would recommend that you do! They have a large selection of interesting plants.

The seeds that the children planted before the Easter holidays have started to grow!

The garden gang were cleaning up the school pond when Mrs Walsh accidentally scooped up a huge frog with a pile of leaves! How wonderful that some of the tadpoles that hatched have made it to adulthood, perhaps thanks to the frog and toad house that we made last year for hibernating amphibians.

Our old shed did not fare well over the winter. It was rotten, and plants and animals were all starting to move in! Thank you so much to the Davis family for removing the old shed and installing this lovely new one! We are so grateful! 

The garden club are happy to have 6 new members, and we also have some great new tools to go in our new shed. 

The Royal Horticultural Society have sent us this useful growing calendar and also some cress seeds.

Wiggonby took part in the RSPB’s ‘Big Bird Count’.

Polytunnel 0 - Wiggonby Winds 5

The recent storms destroyed the just-repaired polytunnel, again, and we decided that enough was enough! Instead, each class will be getting their own greenhouse in which to grow plants, and one of the children had the great idea of turning the old polytunnel site into a vegetable bed. 

As well as Forest School, Class 2 have been to Beach School too! Thank you Geoff, for leading such an informative session. Class 3 are booked in for a session later in the year. We learnt about plants, animals and coastal landscapes, and also collected some rubbish that had been washed up on the shore. 

Children in Class 3 have been learning about how spider plants reproduce. They have planted new spider plants and have each taken one home to care for. 

We harvested some apples and pears from our trees to draw in our art lessons. We have been thinking about harvest time in RE, and have created some beautiful drawings of fruits and vegetables in Art. 

One of our Year 6 pupils was not satisfied with making two bug hotels last year. He wanted to help birds as well, and has made this fantastic bird house himself. It has been put up in our school garden. Well done!

What a sunny September day for harvesting the sunflowers that we grew at the Todhunters’ farm! Aren’t they fabulous? This has been a fabulous experience for the children to plant their own seeds, watch the sunflowers grow and then harvest them. Thank you to Mr and Mrs Todhunter! 

Children in Class 2 went for a walk all around the grounds to inspect each area, so that we can start planning the new school year of gardening.