Tulliallan Primary
Tulliallan Primary

Tulliallan Eco Committee were inspired by bees because they work hard and they make hexagons all day long to store their honey in so we designed our garden in hexagon shapes like their honeycomb. We want to attract more wildlife like bees and other bugs to our playground.
We had some challenges when making our design. Our original plan to reuse our old bug hotel didn’t work because it was too rotten. So we decided to use bamboo and weed-proof material. It turns out hexagons are not easy to make and it made us think bees are even more amazing. We had to do some different attempts to get planters that look like hexagons.
The next challenge was that some of the seeds we planted didn’t grow too well- we think we didn’t space them out enough so we had to try again. It’s also difficult to get blue flowers so we went for white instead so we could still have each hexagon growing a different colour flower. We also had to learn how to tie knots and work together to hang the bug hotels up.
Now our garden is looking beautiful, it’s not a secret anymore- though we might still call it our “secret garden” because it’s hidden amongst some trees. We will tell everyone in our school community about it, explain why it is important and our gardening committee will help to maintain it. We are going to share with the whole school in assembly. We are looking forward to eating some of the produce too! We hope you love our garden as much as we do!
We used recycled things to make our bee or bug hotels. In the middle of our garden is a bee bowl filled with pebbles and water because we know bees need water just like us. We’ve also planted some flowers which we know bees will love like our daisies and lavender.
We have food for bees and food for pupils- we are very excited that our strawberry plants are already beginning to have berries on them. One of our committee suggested we make some rocks look like strawberries which deters birds from eating the fruit. We also took some advice from our mentors about the plants we originally wanted and instead planted nasturtium, marigold and cabbages which are all edible.
Pupils tell the story of thier garden and show you round
These are the skills we learned: teamwork, creativity, planning, organising, problem solving and gardening. We all had different favourite bits. One member liked when we had the finished garden complete. Another pupil said they liked making the bee bath and the bee hotels. One P3 said they liked making the hexagon planters. Another favourite part is that we managed to have lots of different colours of plants which will be good for the earth.
We reused some cardboard (for the base), kitchen roll tubes and empty bottles for our bug hotels. We wanted to reuse a pallet we had but we found it was falling apart too much. Some friendly locals donated bamboo canes and compost which we were delighted to use for our garden.
Our local community supported us by a donation of compost from a farmer. We think he is really kind. We also got bamboo donated and old juice bottles. We plan to make cards for those people.
