At Greenfields we are lucky enough to have an abundance of many things...Amazing children...Wonderful staff...Hard working parents...and lots of GREEN SPACE! Therefore we are working on a project to use some of this space in a way that further increases our impact on our community. On this page, you will find updates about our Community Garden Project, Phase one of which started in May 2019, with the help of some children in Year 5 and 6, using materials donated by local businesses.

Throughout the project we will post information about our progress and seek out volunteers whenever we think we need them. More importantly, when we have made some progress towards Phase Two - Planting, we will be inviting all members of our community to get involved and benefit from the positive wellbeing that gardening brings! 

Greenfields Community Primary school has been incredibly lucky to be chosen for the site of over 1000 trees, across 4 sites in the grounds. At the begining of January 2023, we were finally able to hold two planting days, delayed beacuse of the snow in late 2022, with volunteers from KCC, Golding Homes and Parents, alongside our Gardening club members. The whole event was managed by the Medway Valley Countryside Partnership and has been a great success! We still have a number of trees to plant across the garden area and later this year, we will be planting a new orchard in our Nursery space!

Phase Two - Preparing and Composting

Ks2 Gardening club

Some of our veteran gardeners and new recruits have been very busy after school this term. They have prepared two vegetable patches for sweet peas and pumpkins which have now been planted up. They have also been busy clearing away some of the taller grasses and weeds that came up recently in the rain/sun weather. 

Ks1 Gardening club

Ks1 Gardening club got stuck in to a new project this week - Butterfly Puddling pools! Thank you to Mote Park and BBS construction for the sand and gravel. We recycled a load of classroom trays and collected larger stones and pebbles from the garden to create our little pools. They have now been installed near some of our wild flowers and tyre planters to help our winged visitors!

This steaming pile of bark has been used very expertly by the Gardening club to re-establish some of our pathways and to make newer ones as the garden expands. We have also spent a number of weeks preparing the allotment patches using some of our own compost from last year - we're hoping they'll be good to plant in during the spring!

Gardening club have also been learning about the cycle of work involved in keeping a garden by collecting leaves and filling another compost heap with them - ready for next year! 

Oooh...Tasty!

So proud of this lot! We ALL tried some cooked and uncooked pieces of Squash and Courgette today - all grown in the Garden! 

Gardening club is back!

These superstars have been very busy since club started up again in September. They have been upgrading pathways, planting new seeds and clearing more allotment planters ready for spring!

June 2021 - Year 6 Working party

Science competition entries

July 2021 - We are really excited about all the new plants that children from across the school have planted in the garden and greenhouse this week. All of them entered the last House competition and there is a wonderful range of flowers and vegetables. 

We are very grateful to the Hands of Hope Charity who have supplied us with a wonderful range of seeds, seedlings and plants for our allotment. Gardening club have planted a wide range of the seeds and the seedlings are now in the newly dug over planting beds. There's a courgette and some herbs; we've even got tomatoes growing! 

Click here to see the wonderful work this charity do with communities and schools 

Get Growing (get-growing.co.uk)

Phase one - Landscaping

We spent some of our lunchtimes excitedly planting bulbs into our new Pot Rockery and Tyre planters, ready for Spring. Once we had learnt which way up the bulb should be planted (hairy bits at the bottom!) we then carefully pushed them down into the soil and compost mix we had already prepared. Afterwards, we surveyed the whole area to make sure each bulb was covered well enough. Now we'll need to protect them a little more with some netting we think. 

All we need to add now are the Gardening club members and some plants!

This project seemed like a really symbolic way of Year 6 completing their time in Primary school. They worked well together, in quite warm conditions some times, to prepare and organise the area. Thank you to them all and best wishes for all the futures that your paths lead you too! 

July and August

We had grand plans to have phase one finished by the end of this summer period, but without being able to run gardening club since March we had to change our plans. However, after letting the garden go wild for a few months, we started work on some specific areas again during the holidays.

Coming to work in the garden during the bright sunny days was a real pleasure and because we had let nature take over, we were rewarded with sightings of all kinds of wild flowers, butterflies, crickets, birds and other creatures. The local fox even returned to his old home for a few weeks!  

Look what's been growing during May and June!

Well done Gardening club; these are some of the bulbs you planted way back in late January. Can you work out which flower they are?

BULB PLANTING Early March

We've got our compost fix on and planted a wide variety of bulbs into all the nooks and crannies of our new mound. We made this space from the turf we dug up in January. We've also added some planters to the tops of our living fences and planted some bulbs in there too! Fingers crossed we may see some lovely results in May, June and July.