Tuesday, 17th October saw a very special whole school assembly where our visitors were: Chair of B&NES Council – Cllr Sarah Moore, Chair and Judges of Bath in Bloom - Steve and Christine Brook and Steve and Julia Rea, along with Cllr Grant Johnson who is a governor of the school. Cllr Moore and Steve Rea presented year 6 gardeners William, Miya and Bartosz with our prizes.

We received a beautiful silver trophy to keep in school for this year but with our name on it forever, a certificate saying our school was awarded GOLD, and an engraved hand fork along with a big bag of daffodil bulbs and seeds. Mrs Shackleton, who runs the gardening club, claimed the £100 cheque saying, “it would buy a lot of compost, plants and seeds to keep all the gardeners busy.”

After the prize giving the whole school sang their hearts out to entertain our visitors with a song medley from Matilda and then once the children left, Mrs Shackleton showed the visitors around our amazing school grounds including the Playscape which is a wild area where the children do Forest School activities.

Our beautiful garden is an ever-changing space full of colour and busy gardeners. We have a rainbow shaped flower bed to grow different coloured flowers, a productive fruit garden where we can pick apples, pears, plums and rhubarb, a potting shed, a greenhouse, and seating areas. We also grow strawberries, blackcurrants, and vegetable beds that always include sweetcorn but also carrots, beans, garlic, and other herbs.

We grow a lot of our plants from seed, starting them off in the heated propagator on the staffroom windowsills in January and February. We have already planted one hundred hyacinths to sell at Christmas and Mrs Shackleton will be decorating pebbles over the next few weeks, again to sell and raise funds for the gardening club.

Surplus plants and produce are sold to our amazingly supportive parents and children at the front of school with all the proceeds going back into the kitty to do it all again with another set of children the following year.

Our whole school works with the Pride in Paulton volunteers to plant 1000’s of crocus bulbs on the grass verges of Park Road every year, which raises awareness for the Purple4Polio campaign organised by the Rotary Club. We also have an open garden event in the summer where everyone is invited to come and meet our fantastic gardeners and let them show you around their beautiful garden. There is also an annual plant stall at the fabulous Party in the Park each summer.

Our school garden is amazing, and we are very pleased that our efforts have resulted in being judged gold and best school garden, but this is only because our school gardeners are a fantastic bunch of children who work really hard to make this special space the best that it can be.

Haley Shackleton

Paulton Junior School