Getting green-fingered in Brighton

During the last week of June, Barbara Marsden, another East Sussex ambassador, and I took part in the Brighton & Hove Schools Heritage and Environment Festival. This is the fourth time the event has run and the second time Send a Cow has been involved.

The festival was held in the grounds of Moulsecoomb Primary school on the outskirts of Brighton. It involved around 800 children from 12 schools across the city participating in a range of hands-on practical workshops that helped to give them an understanding of the world around them, mostly their local heritage, culture and landscape but also included an international dimension.

This is where Send a Cow comes in. As one of the event organisers, I felt that workshops based on natural gardening and in particular creating a Keyhole Garden and a number of Bag Gardens would not only give an African dimension, it would also form the centre piece of the school’s ‘World Garden’.

By building the Keyhole Garden, we used many of the materials that were available round us, such as remnants of oak plant and chalk. It was good to get across to the children the fact that in Africa, to make the project as sustainable as possible, they would use whatever materials are to hand.

The chalk we used was recycled from Brighton & Hove Albion’s new stadium site and the soil came from the Brighton & Hove community compost centre. The Bag Gardens were created using the Send a Cow Bag Garden starter kits.

I managed to obtain lettuce and celery plants from a commercial producer near Chichester (South End farm), where I had helped to promote Send a Cow at an Open Farm Sunday event the month before. Tomato, aubergine and pepper plants came from Moulsecoomb Forest Garden, a community allotment project for local disadvantaged children, and I also grew some purple mustard and beetroots from the Bag Garden kits.

Children from various schools helped create and plant the gardens through the week. Mostly they came from primary schools across the city. However the Thursday afternoon was designated for secondary schools as it is often more difficult to engage this age group.

One afternoon, we held a teacher training session with about 100 teachers from both East & West Sussex. They had the chance to participate in the workshops and it gave us the chance to talk about the work of Send a Cow to staff who might be able to influence their schools to build their own Keyhole and Bag Gardens.

The whole event was hugely inspiring and it gave us a very good chance to promote the wonderful and life-changing work of Send a Cow.