It’s been a busy few weeks at Howden. Both benches are finished (hurrah!) and look fantastic. We had plenty of help from Willie, who took the time to teach some of our volunteers a thing or two about stone, drystone walling, mortar, and how to balance a wheelbarrow on your chin… the less said about that the better! But the seats look great and we look forward to making good use of them throughout the summer to come.
The bulbs have come out so that’s been a welcome splash of colour in the garden. We also arrived one day to the remains of a fairly large bonfire. Fortunately, we were digging out turf in the new orchard-to-be at Toronto Primary the following week, so I got the teachers to help bring a few barrows of rather nice turf round and now you can hardly tell where the fire was. And we made a turf fish in the playground with the rest… as you do! I mentioned the Penicuik turf fish that the Edinburgh MWG did, with its discoball eyes and that was the teachers sold on that idea! I predict a wave of turf fishes appearing across the Lothians, it’s just a matter of time. One more and we’ve got a shoal.
We’ve dug over the potato patch and got the first lot of potatoes planted. And some vegetable seeds have been planted in pots by some of the P7s from Toronto Primary. There are 10 pupils who have started on a 10-week Green Gym programme, and they’ll be working towards their John Muir Awards with a bit of help from us. So, as part of that, they’ll be looking after the seedlings until they’re big enough for planting out.
The BLES trainees have been hard at work digging out stumps inside and outside the garden, so now we have a large pile of rhododendron, and we all know that the best thing to for rhodie is burning so it may be marshmallow time 🙂