Whinhill Primary School

Sgeulachd nan Coinneach Coimha – The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies by Beatrix Potter

Our garden tells The Tale of The Flopsy Bunnies. We chose this as it reminded us of the exciting day when we watched, astonished, as 4 baby rabbits popped out from under our potting shed. Our class is the Gaelic P1-3 and all the Beatrix Potter books have been translated into Gaelic, so this worked for us too.

The Flopsy Bunnies

Mini compost bins

Hand sewn sacks

Our school building is surrounded by our own large areas of uncultivated ground with a variety of wild-flowers that attract bees, moths and butterflies. We aimed therefore more at planting in our Pocket Garden the sort of vegetables growing in Mr McGregor’s garden in the story. We planted carrots, lettuce, Swiss chard, tomatoes and courgettes. We mixed in, for colour, calendula, nasturtiums and strawberry plants, all of which have edible or herbal uses.

Gaelic Primary 1-3 set aside one afternoon a week to grow our plants and to make the items such as miniature recycling bins, the sacks for pot-holders and the painted plastic cartons surrounding the pallet, and most importantly of course, to make our 6 bunnies. Gardening, crafting, sewing and working together made for fun afternoons while also learning new skills.

We had kept our pallet from last year’s Pocket Garden and filled it with grape hyacinths for spring. We then lifted the bulbs (and kept them), renewed the soil, added compost from the local recycling centre, made improvements to the structure using bits of broken pallets, painted it and then planted up. We had lots of vegetables to spare and they are now in our garden plot. Our Pocket Garden will be there all summer and reused for bulbs over winter.

We love our bunnies and our hand sewn sacks, but mostly we’re just proud that we made a brand new garden from all the old things we found, and are thrilled with how well our plants grew from seed.