Our nursery is in the heart of Grangemouth.  Many of our families have connections to the Ineos/BP oil refinery and some of the chimneys can be seen from our nursery garden.  Sometimes we can see the flames and steam from the chimneys.  Sadly the refinery is closing this year. It has been an integral part of the local area since 1924 so we felt it was a fitting tribute to use the refinery as inspiration for our pocket garden.

We reused old hi-vis jackets and trousers, 2 pairs of old work boots, and a helmet which were donated by an Ineos employee.

Our garden has been designed with nature in mind. We have incorporated a bug hotel, bird bath and many bee friendly flowers. We have used potatoes, strawberries, carrots, onions, cress, radishes and a last minute addition of a ‘curry’ plant.

We have learnt how to grow flowers from seed, what flowers bees like, what plants give us food, and how to look after plants to keep them growing.  Our favourite part was seeing the changes in the garden each week and finally having flowers which the bees loved!

We faced several challenges:

• the hot weather – we had to arrange access through the Easter holidays to water the garden
• some of our seedlings didn’t take when planted outdoors and we had to adjust our initial ideas
• getting the timings right – some of our plants have yet to flower, and ones we thought would grow fast did not grow as fast as we had hoped. Our strawberries are there but not yet red
• our wildflowers literally went wild and have covered up the ‘chimneys’ and blocked light to some of our other plants, however we made the decision not to cut them back as the bees were loving them
• the nursery children were very keen to help, however it was challenging trying to get some of them to understand that we couldn’t dig in the garden after we had planted seeds/seedlings and that although the flowers were beautiful, we weren’t to pick them as the bees needed them. We did lose the flowers from the strawberry plants and had to replace the bug hotel tubes twice as they were often found around the garden.

We had donations of old clothing from an employee of Ineos.  We had a bag of compost donated by B&Q.  One of our parents came into nursery and safely sawed up the drainpipes to make our ‘chimneys’.

Our garden will remain in place for as long as it can. We will harvest the strawberries, radishes, onions, potatoes, and carrots and see if we can use them to make something in nursery.

This is the first time we have entered the competition and it has been a lovely experience and one which we hope to do again next year.