The forces of nature that create caves can be used to grow mushrooms and support plants such as ferns and succulents. Our garden is wildlife friendly as it has a water feature and has been planted with buttercups and white clover that are good for pollinators. We will add a few of our RHS Grow with It flowers for extending the pollinator season.

Our edible plants will mainly be the mushrooms. They have yet to fruit but we are hoping!

It has been fun seeing how it is possible to turn a creative idea into a reality. We only have 40 mins a week so time has been challenging, especially once the construction moved to Queen St Community Garden. We have worked well as a team, sharing out roles and mucking in.

We learned about measuring – it has been tricky to get the fish boxes in place with enough space for both the succulents and the mushroom culture. We have sown seeds for our project, so plant care has been part of the learning. The design process involved a lot of discussion and debate before we got to the final design. Plants needed to be researched and construction issues identified.

We asked for help from the Men’s Shed in Broughty Ferry to put a rim on the pallet to allow us to build up the compost to the height of the pond. They were marvelous as always. We asked our mentor Anthony McCluskey for ideas and included some mint. We also got our pond plant donation from a parent, following his advice. The succulents came from gardens and Broughty Ferry in Bloom plant sale.

We reused fish boxes which we collected from Arbroath, an old wash basin for our pond and included a bird box – which may even be used by bees if we are lucky. The pallet was reused too.

There have been challenges. The first one was how to cover the fish boxes. Plan A was to use concrete. The prototype weighed a tonne and it was not nice working with concrete dust. Plan B was to bash the boxes a bit to make them more rock like and then paint them with a slightly texture paint. Much nicer to construct and decidedly lighter.

The garden will live in Queen Street Community Garden with an information sheet about it on the notice board.