Myra Heller at Newington Green Primary School

We have started spring term at Newington Green School and it's very exciting partly because the horrible weather is finally lifting. We have been working hard trying to clear the wildly overgrown space hidden behind the school like a secret. It's now our orchard and the children planted some baby fruit trees which was just great. We put in some pear, apples and plums. The children were thrilled to see the blossom just coming out of the buds. We talked about dormancy and why it was important to plant trees when they are asleep.

Year 3 are doing teeth in science and I have been struggling a little making the workshops relevant, apart from talking about how the nice fresh crunchy veg they're going to grow will do their teeth good! However, they have been studying ancient Romans and there has been a fantastic wealth of stuff to discuss there. Fortunately in the 'Mediterranean area' (e.g. the tubs in the playground) we just happen to have some plants that the Romans brought to Britain. So we stomped about pretending to be Centurions marching across filthy, muddy, uncivilised Britain taking with us the wondrous 'Lavare' (lavender) to keep us clean and anaesthetize our wounds.There was an olive tree so we talked about olive oil and how important it was and is as a food stuff and medicine. We looked at the fig tree and I struggled with trying to explain how it represented fertility. 'Is it a girl plant?' they asked. Also that the flower is contained inside the fruit and that it may have been the first ever plant cultivated by humans. We looked at the orange tree and I talked about citrus and that there were hundreds of kinds and tried to get them to guess some others. They got lemon and so I said it's a thick skinned colourful fruit that's very juicy inside, so they yelled out 'watermelon!'

We have planted seeds in the greenhouse: 5 kinds of tomato, yellow ones, cherry, stripy, big ones and prolific ones. Multicoloured capsicums, courgettes and sweetcorn. The broad beans we planted outside in autumn have come up but the peas died in the frost. We've just built new compost bins from recycled pallets which we have lined with cardboard that was being thrown away. We have yet to talk to the kitchens about saving peelings for the compost. Worms and compost next week and more seeds going in.