Greenhills Primary School

Stone Soup

We chose the story of Stone Soup, a traditional tale from Eastern Europe. The story tells of a hungry traveller who visits a food scarce village. He knocks on the door of each house in the village, but all the villagers refuse to give him anything to eat. So, he announces he will make stone soup and, borrowing a pot, he fills it with water and puts in a couple of large stones. Tasting the soup, the traveller declares its delicious but needs salt and a little butter. The villagers give him some, then he says it would be even better with a potato, carrot and slowly the ingredients are added to make the soup which the villagers and the traveller all share at the end of the story. We chose this story because it shows how sharing is not only caring, but how much stronger and better we can be working together as a team.

Tasty herbs growing

What's cooking?

Story characters

Our garden has bug boxes for the wildlife, a bee watering station made from a bowl filled with stones that have the characters from the story painted on (our gardening club helped with this). We have also included lots of wildlife friendly herbs such as thyme, oregano, chives and nasturtiums and our broccoli is uncovered to encourage the cabbage white butterfly to lay eggs.

In the cooking pot is a small pond with aquatic plants and large stones like those in the story for wildlife to land on. Underneath the pond is a hanging basket that has been filled with lots of sticks of different sizes to provide hidey holes for wildlife and cover for them is given by red, orange and yellow flowers which represent the fire.

Aside from the herbs and broccoli already mentioned we have planted vegetables for the soup, including potatoes, wheat, carrots, peas, garlic and onions.

We used old cutlery for our plant markers, an old ceramic bowl for the bee watering station, an old hessian sack to grow our potatoes in and wove scraps of fabric into the willow for the peas to climb up.

We had wheat seeds donated by the Royal Highland Education Trust who run a ‘Grow your own loaf’ campaign. We had advice and several plants donated by an active member of the Scottish Rock Garden Club. A member of the Strathaven Climate Action Group donated the hessian bag to grow the potatoes in.

We definitely learned that some things are easier to imagine than to create and we had to try several different ways to make our woodpile so that we could plant flowers into it!

After the competition we would like to let our garden carry on growing so we can enjoy harvesting the vegetables and watching and hunting for wildlife.