Glenmanor Primary School

Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead), Mexico

Glenmanor’s Pocket Garden entry celebrates Mexico’s Day of the Dead, Día de Muertos. This theme was chosen because it would provide opportunity for bright colours along with interesting features that could be added to the garden to make it unique.

Colourful chillies growing

Something refreshing to drink

Tasty strawberries

Our garden is wildlife friendly as it provides flowers for bees and a bug hotel for insects and bugs to create a habitat. In our garden we have the following that is edible: strawberries, peas, thyme, sage, mint, chilies, strawberries, tomatoes and parsley. We tried to reuse as many materials as possible when creating our garden. Children and staff members brought in plant pots from home to be recycled and reused. The lights that are included are Christmas lights that were on a tree in our school garden. The wood to build the trellis, structure was donated by a grandparent who has a building company and a parent helper very kindly built the structure for us. We received plant donations from staff (strawberries, lavender) and family members (mint) and reused some plants that were in the school garden already.

Our garden includes the following plants: Dahlias, lavender, giant sunflowers, sweet peas, strawberries, tomatoes, mint, pansies, chilies, peas and the herbs; sage, oregano and curled parsley.

Now that our garden is complete we will continue to look after it as there are still plants that are not ready to be harvested or finished growing/flowering. It will also be able to be enjoyed by other classes and staff members in the school. Hopefully other classes will be inspired to enter and build their own pocket garden next year.

We learned a lot growing and building this garden, the children that were involved thoroughly enjoyed it and even asked if we can continue the garden club because it was so much fun! They know how to replant seedlings independently and provide support for taller plants to stop them falling over! Due to the frosty weather at the start of process it delayed our growing slightly and we tried to utilize our school poly tunnel as much as possible to help nurture the plants.

The children came up with great ideas for the pocket garden such as making the sugar skull wind chimes and decorating the pots to make them more attractive looking. It was great to see how it developed over the short period of time and parents even commented that their children were wanting to grow flowers and vegetables at home. It has also been lovely to see how other children and staff members that were out in the garden enjoyed seeing its progress.

Garden design