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Elphinstone Primary

Elphinstone Primary

The finished garden

In September we will be celebrating 100 years since our school building opened. In honor of our Centenary year we wanted to pay tribute to the history and community of Elphinstone.  Overall this has been a fantastic project to allow the children to become responsible citizens and take pride in their heritage.

Our mound or ‘bing’ covers 2 tubes ‘mines’ for wildlife to explore whilst the soil on top welcomes the perfect wormery for natures engineers to enjoy. Our pond invites wildlife to take a drink or bathe on hot days.

There are many edible features of our pocket garden; starting with our 6 bed planter filled with herbs including rosemary, chives, dill, parsley, coriander and mint. In the top planter of our pocket garden pea shoots are starting to grow upwards and will continue to grow around our mining wheel as they naturally engineer themselves.

A scarecrow will guard our crops
Creating the lettering from old pen tops
Tasty herbs

All aspects of our mini garden were donated and reused starting with the pallet from a recent delivery, wheel, pond and coal from our Janitors garden, birdhouses, paint and tubes from neighbours, pen lids from our recycling station in school, herb cuttings from our nursery garden and finally our scarecrow from recycled materials in our school.

We thoroughly enjoyed welcoming members of our community in to help us with our project and were able to benefit from their expert knowledge of gardening. We now have 2 gardening slots per week where member of the community are welcome to come and join us.

Whilst creating our mini garden we revamped our garden area which is now a quiet sanctuary for outdoor learning with lovely benches, stepping stones and various plants all donated locally and will be enjoyed for years to come. Our pocket garden is at the center of it all. We would like to thank Keep Scotland Beautiful for this challenge as it has reignited our love of gardening.

Pupils had different favourite parts of creating our garden:

  • “My favourite part was turning the birdhouses into mini school buildings”.
  • “My favourite part was when the fork lift arrived to deliver stones to decorate our garden”.
  • “My favourite part was watching the journey of our garden turn from an unused area to something beautiful that we can all enjoy and be proud of”.
  • “My favourite part was painting the pallet”.
The original design

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