Tarradale Nursery

The Living Garden, hosted by the Garden for Life Forum promotes wildlife friendly gardening. Schools were invited to design a small garden including celebrating the 2017 year of History, Heritage and Archaeology.  Meet Tattybogle, a scarecrow from a story Tarradale Nursery enjoy, linking literature, planting and old-fashioned pest control.

Tattybogle

Seeds need help to grow

Wellies and window boxes

Every garden tells a story about the people who helped make it, the challenges faced, solutions found, lessons learned and the unexpected pleasures along the way. Here is Tarradale Nursery’s Pocket Garden Story in their own words:

We talked with the children about our garden and mind-mapped their ideas. The children found the Tattybogle book and we read it. Conor drew Tattybogle.

We asked Simpsons garden centre in Inverness to help us and they were very kind and gave us most of our plants, seeds and organic peat free compost.

We gave our parents’ a list of items we could use for ‘Tattybogle’, things like old wood, soup tins, plant pots and straw. We discussed how we wanted to re- use, re-cycle and reduce what we had to buy. 

We used the compost from the school hot composter and mixed it with donated compost.

The children planted like mad and we soon took up most of the space in the polytunnel! We have learnt lots of new skills while working on Tattybogle: gardening, joinery, problem solving, teamwork, design, communication and having FUN!

We learned how to use tools safely and respectfully. We used numbers in real situations. We used measure and positional language. We learned how to follow a given criteria. We learned it is okay to be wrong and make mistakes. We discovered we can re-use old stuff and make something new.

The bug hotel and Hedgehog house was the favourite thing to do, we collected grass, sticks, pine cones and had a good rummage in our junk box. Next we have plans for Mrs Tattybogle !

Planting seeds

Growing

Building the base

Conor's drawing