Families Growing Together

Joint Winner: 2019 My Favourite Garden Public Vote

A garden for holding onto rain, even the scarecrow's hat and hands become water collectors. Wellington boots here are for keeping water in, not out and a leaky hose puts water straight to the roots of the salad crops.

Water made of beads

Frog and gnome

Rain catching roof

The group Families Growing Together is an after-school group for parents and children where children do gardening and craft activities. It takes place mainly at EATS Rosyth Community Garden and Orchard in Rosyth.   

This Pocket Garden is full of ways to catch and hold on to rain to reduce flooding. The roof and guttering direct water to a tank and garden features help too. Rain can collect in the scarecrow's hat and hands, in an upside down umbrella, and welly boots too!

All the herbs and wild flowers in the garden were sown in the classroom in the orchard in early March and then grown on in the greenhouse.  Children reused a blackboard that made up part of their Pocket Garden in 2018 by scraping off the papier mache covering.  The frame was made from some reclaimed timber using a panel saw. Children enjoyed acquiring new skills in learning the use of the saw! Next, children screwed the frame together with a battery drill and painted it to look like a house front.

Scraping

Building

More building

Painting

In the original design, the back of the garden is built to look like a house, with a gutter along the roof to catch rain.

There's a scarecrow in the middle of the garden with his hands and hat turned up to catch rain too. He holds a watering can that has water coming out of it in the form of reused blue beads.

All of the caught rainwater is stored in a tank at the back of the garden and flows out through a perforated hose that leads to a pond for wildlife surrounded by flowers at the front of the garden.

This garden is designed to catch rainwater that the salad crop will slowly use up.

Welly boots are used to hold flowers and keep the water IN rather than OUT.  

Salad vegetables fill in the spaces around the scarecrow and if you look closely you can find the gnomes hiding in the flowers!

This Pocket Garden is a Rain Garden.  A rain garden is an area of plants designed to hold rainfall, then slowly release it, helping to reduce the severity of flooding.  Rain gardens filter the water naturally through their plants, soil and gravel. This filtered, clean water then flows more slowly to our rivers and streams. Any way of temporarily holding rain can be a rain garden, like a planter box that sits below a downpipe. Ideas about how to grow a rain garden can be found here.