Rosneath Primary School

The Bare Necessities!

The children chose this story because it is a timeless classic we all love. It has messages of resilience, supporting our friends, helping one another, staying strong together, taking only what we need from nature and enjoying nature’s harvest. The river is a central feature of the jungle book story as Baloo and Mogli bond while drifting down stream together. It also sustains all life in the forest. We have depicted this with our waterfall feature made from recycled milk bottles and the gleaming cascade of old DVD’s meandering through the garden.

Frog bathing pool

Watch out for Kaa

Bottle water feature

Our garden provides a bug hotel, a water feature for insects, bees or frogs, bird feeders, two bird houses, a bird bath, plants for pollinators, such as clematis, mint and sweet peas, and lots of nooks and crannies to hide in safety.

We have included edible plants such as herbs (mint, thyme and sage), also vegetables including peas, chard, and tomatoes. We also included ‘jungle’ foliage I the form of fatsia and ferns.

While creating the garden we have learned a great deal about taking a paper design through to a three dimensional living structure and working within a timeframe. We have learned that slugs can be a problem in our garden as they ate a lot of our initial seeds growth and have since researched some natural ways to prevent this in the future. We had to adjust our plans and find alternatives to meet our deadline. We held a very successful fundraising event to buy the seeds, plants and compost needed to get started on our growing journey and were supported well by the school community and wider community. We worked with a local community garden and were able to grow some seeds for them, helping to plant them out in exchange for a variety of seedlings for our own projects.

We very much hope to continue to nurture our pocket garden and enjoy the harvest of veg in the next few weeks. We will continue to care for it and observe any wildlife it attracts, adding to the wildlife friendly plants as we have plenty more seeds to plant to maintain the biodiversity we have begun to establish.

We are very proud of the creativity and enthusiasm the children have shown during the project.