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Growing Pumpkins

The pumpkin plants were about 10 centimetres when my teacher brought them to school. We kept them in the class for a few weeks. In May I measured out an area of 1 m²for each pumpkin. I dug a hole and filled it with farmyard manure. I covered it and made a mound with a moat around it. I planted a tiny pumpkin at the top of each mound. We put a mini-greenhouse around it to protect it from strong winds. There were a few yellow flowers on the plant when we got our summer holidays.

During the summer enormous green leaves grew on the plants and hidden in the middle were two very large pumpkins. We measured the stem and found that one of the pumpkin plants had grown over 3 metres. It grew and grew like a giant beanstalk and covered our herbs and strawberries. We will let our pumpkin grow for several more weeks.

We let our pumpkin grow until Novenber. Then we harvested then and brought them inside. We weighed then and found that the heavier one weighed 10 kilogrammes.We hope to cook them later in the term

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I Won the Prize

One day we heard that the Garden clob was holding a competition to guess the weight og the larger pumpkin. They brought ina 1 kilo weight . We got a chance to hold the weight in our hands before we had to guess the weight of the pumplin. We all had to write down our guess on a list.


The next week I got a marvellous surprise. I was one of six people in the school to guess the exact weight which was 10 kilos. My prize was to help to cook the pumpkin. First I helped cut it into thousands of little cubes. We also chopped up some of thepotatoes and onions form the garden to use in the soup.

We had a large pot and we made Pumpkin soup for over 20 childre. We also made pumpkin ice pops and baked some of the seeds and made a delicious snack.

We also went down to the staff room and ate wedges, pumpkin soup and the pumpkin ice pops. It was a fantastic meal.

Growing Onions

We planted our onions in May. We used small onions called sets and left 12 centimetres between each onion.





























In the beginning some magpies or pigeons pulled up our onion sets.This is a picture of our onions in June. We had a very successful crop as every single onion grew.











When we returned to school on the 1st of September our onions were ready to harvest. We picked them all in a few minutes and then we brought them inside to dry. We will use them next month when we hope to cook some of our vegetables.

Sunflowers

In May the pupils in Senior Infants and 1st class sowed sunflower seeds. They planted out the sunflowers in the garden. The sunflowers grew very tall during the summer holidays.

When we came back to school we were a bit disappointed because the sunflowers weren’t in bloom. We think that the bad weather delayed the flowers.

This week we were very happy to see that the sunflowers had started to bloom. I measured the tallest plant and discovered that it had grown 2 metres 70 centimetres in 14 weeks. The stem of the sunflower is coarse and hairy. I used a piece of string to measure the circumference of the thickest stem. It was 12 centimetres. When the sunflowers finish blooming we will leave them there so that the birds can eat the seeds.

September Podcast

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Preparing the Site

Preparing the site was the most difficult part. Darragh and Frank worked for hours and hours removing rubble, rotovating and raking until our site was prepared and ready for planting. Finally they laid slabs to that we would have place to stand when we were working in the garden.

This is a picture of the rotovator that they used. It was very heavy and you needed lots of strength to control it.