Seed collecting in October

Beans

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seed collecting in October

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunflowers

 

Fennel

 

Easy Home Seed Drying & Storage

This is a really important bit. You need to dry your seed out, or it will not keep. Seed that is air-dry is not really properly dormant - its just napping; so it is still burning through its stored reserves of energy and will soon run flat - like a mobile phone left on.

Also, you can't put it in a sealed container as it is still breathing - it would suffocate. And without a sealed container, it will soon reabsorb water from the air on the first humid day, and start getting ready to germinate.

How can we dry the seed at home?

We'll use dry rice to suck the water out of the seed & get it really dry. Then it will hibernate completely.

You need to get:

·                    a big jam-jar with a good lid,

·                    an old pair of tights,

·                    a rubber band,

·                    and some rice

You need to use at least twice as much rice as you have seed. It doesn't matter if you have too much rice, but too little won't work.

Bake the rice on a tray in the oven for 45 minutes until it is bone dry. While it is still hot, put it in the jam-jar , about half full, and screw the lid on .

Wait patiently until the rice is cool. (If you rush this you'll cook your seeds.) So you now have a jam jar 1/2 full of very dry, cool rice.

Put your seed in a bag made by cutting off the foot of the tights, and tie it in with a rubber band. Put it in with the cool dry rice. Put the lid on tightly, so damp air can't get in.

Leave your seed sealed in the jar with the dry rice for a fortnight, and the dampness in the seed will be drawn out into the rice.

You now have bone-dry seed that you can safely seal in a plastic bag, and it will keep for several years. So you don’t need to grow each thing every year.

Passing it Round

This is also important. You will have huge amounts of seed. If you are sure you avoided crossing, and that your plants were nice and healthy, then you have a valuable thing there.

Suppose you are growing kale seed. You would get about two and a half kilos of seed from a 20-foot-long bed of 30 plants. Now that's actually three-quarters of a million seeds - and if every one of those was given away or swapped, and then grown, you will have created more than 500,000 kilograms of kale! More than enough to feed all your friends and neighbours, and their families.

So you can see that even one person, on a small scale, can make a real contribution to local food security. Take your spare seed to a local seed swap, or even better, organise your own. Get to gether with your friends or family and set up a seed-circle: one person can grow kale seed, another parsnips, another cucumber, etc etc. You'll all have bags of seed - you can all just swap with each other, so no-one has to save seed from more than a couple of things, yet you all get seed of everything.

It will save you a fortune, and you'll get great, locally-adapted varieties. Just remember, all this is only possible because you are growing real, open-pollinated seed. You can't do this with hybrid (F1) varieties. Funny how the seed companies are so keen on selling you hybrid seed, isn't it?

This document by The Real Seed Collection Ltd (www.realseeeds.co.uk) is licensed for public use under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works Licence.
This means you can copy or share it as much as you like for noncommercial purposes, as long as you say where you got it, and don't change it.

September 2012

The start of the New Term!

It was fantastic to return in September and see how things had grown. And thank you to the staff who watered when they could.
Some plants have done better than others.  The tomatoes were not great, because some of them got blight, but we did have a few. We had lots of cucmbers, and the peppers that were grown were most definately "Chilli" peppers. 
Note: remember to label plants with full name.........

The butternut squashes did not do as well as expected, but I think that is because they were in small pots and we have also had a very wet summer, so next year we will try planting in the ground.

Eco Schools Green Flag

YIPEEEEEEEEE

 

JBS Green Flag

At the end of last term we were really excited to hear that we had achieved our "Green Flag".  Click image to read what the Gazette and Herald had to say.

Calne in Bloom 2012

Green Calne Day

The Art of Recycling

This art work was produced by some of the students from school.  The individual letters having been made using a process called "locker hooking".  Each square has been made by using a variety of recycled materials from crisp packets, (crisps eaten and packets washed!),  plastic bags and waste material.  
Currently displayed in Calne Library:

Plant Sale

A successful day in which the Eco group raised £42 selling plants. This has enabled us to purchase more compost, gardening gloves and organic, child friendly slug slime......to stop them eating our plants!

Greenhouse

The School now has a greenhouse, which is already full of seeds and young plants.  The tomato plants that were planted by the year 11's a couple of months ago are now about 1ft tall and looking really healthy.  We have cucumber, butternut squash, corgettes, peppers, chilli's, gourds, pumpkins, garlic, onion, lots of different herbs which will be used by food tech,  and a variety of flowers that are being grown for the Calne in Bloom, Queens Diamond Jubilee flower competion that was won by

 Sophie King 9BB

pictures of the birds

14th May 2012                                                                        

18th May 2012                                                                         

 

23rd May 2012                                                                            

 Today is the day the Olympic Torch came through Calne.........  We came in on Monday and the hardware to the computer has stopped working so I'm unable to get anymore images of the babies.  There are sadly only 5 left but they are growing  up fast.

28th May 2012

Monday morning and the baby birds have flown the nest, 8 eggs were laid, 7 hatched, 2 babies died in the first few days and only 4 flew the nest.

Day 1             Box put up:

Day 2             Blue tits start building their nest

Day 21           Eggs are laid

Day 31          Incubation has started

Day 42          Eggs have hatched

Day 62          Birds have flown

Nest box with camera

Diary of our JBS Blue Tits

Monday 8th May:  Great excitement this morning as the eggs have hatched and mum is busy feeding her brood.

Friday 4th May:  The Web cam is now streaming, just few little tweaks and it should be available for everyone to watch, until then here is a picture of Mum sat from the live feed:

Monday 30th April: Very windy, wet weather all weekend, came in this morning and Mum is sat on the eggs still.

Friday 27th April: Mum was sitting on the eggs when I got into school and Ms Bates had seen her the night before, she spent the day on the eggs: I think this is the start of mum incubating her eggs.

Thursday 26th April: Again didn't see any birds.

Wednesday 25th April: So excited this morning as Ms Bates had seen Mummy Blue Tit in the next the previous evening. The Eco Group checked the web cam at lunchtime and again no birds, I am worried about the eggs:

Tuesday 24th April: I have checked the web cam several times and have seen no birds, I am worried they have left the nest because of the activity around the tree whilst the wiring was being repaired.

Blue Tits nest is made of moss and lined with soft material such as hair and feathers.  They start egg laying between late March and early June and produce one brood.  The clutch can be between 7 and 16 eggs that are white with speckles.

Blue Tits like a small next box with a 25mm hole (or larger) and it needs to be placed about 1-5meters above ground.  Position the box facing East with a clear  flight path to entrance.  The reason for facing East is that the box warms up early when the sun rises and is protected from the heat of the midday sun.

Tuesday 17th April: The wires have been fixed and WOW! It looks as if 8 eggs have been laid.

Half Term: It would appear that the Blue Tits have built a nest, unfortunately we did not have the camera connected to the website so we missed the nest being build. We then noticed that we had lost the image from inside the box and upon further investigation it looks like the camera wire has been chewed through by squirrels.
Day One: 28th March 2012: The nest box and feeder were put up on the large Oak tree so the birds could get used to it..... I didn't expect Blue Tits to start nesting the next day.
Mr Thornton and I fixed the camera into the box with the blue tit still in it.

INFORMATION:  

The Blue Tit can lay between 7 and 16 eggs.   It's the female that incubates the eggs and for this she has a "brood patch" which is an area of the belly which has fewer feathers so the birds warmth is passed to eggs. This brood patch forms just before breeding season and then disappears.

Most birds only start to incubate their eggs when the whole clutch has been laid. This is to ensure that all chicks will hatch at the same time, otherwise the bird would have to abandon brooding unhatched eggs to forage to feed those that she has. Incubation is between 13-14 days. When the female has laid its clutch she will start to sit on the eggs, they start to incubate when they reach the temperature of 37°C . The female will also turn the egg so they are warmed evenly.

The blue tit's feed their young almost exclusively on insect larvae, which are most abundant in early summer. Consequently, they generally put "all their eggs in one basket" by laying a single, large clutch of eggs.

Nestlings fledge after 18-19 days

Key Words:

Nestling - A bird too young to leave its nest:

Clutch - All the eggs that have been laid at one time.

Fledge - The stage when a bird has feathers and is strong enough to fly.

Incubate- To provide heat

Brood - Number of young hatched at the same time.

Art of Recycling

Bee Wild at JBS

Bird box

The bird box was put up yesterday and this morning their are two blue tits flying in and out.

28th March and the box now has the camera fitted, the bird feeder has been put up, now all we need to do is connect to a computer and we will be able to watch from a live feed.

Click on image below for more information about Blue Tits 

Close-up

Nestling

Fledgling

Blue Tits Juvenile

Trip to the BRE in Watford

Lets start growing!

We've made a start at growing!







Today at lunchtime club we made some mini propegators using empty milk cartons.  The group have planted Chilli seeds and Basil, as January is a great time to start sowing them.

We have seeded some sweetpeas in recycled cardboard tubes.  We used the carboard tubes because sweetpeas like to have room for their roots to grow, they also don't like having their roots disturbed so when the seedlings are big enough they can be planted straight into the ground.

The students have taken their seedling back to their tutor rooms to look after them. Hopefully they will remember to water them.

Lets see how long they take to germinate.

Leaf mulch

LEAF MOULD

Making our own compost is great fun and free.

It takes about a year for the leaf mould to rot down and when it's ready it will act as a fantastic soil improver and a mulch for existing plants. A mulch is a soil covering.

We started by making a container from old unused fencing wire that had been saved.  We then collected all the leaves from around the Science block and filled the basket, as they start to rot we will continue to add move leaves. 

Leaf mould is best used for older plants and can be mixed in with other composts for planting out containers.

Let's Grow Vouchers 2011

Here's what we got for school using all the vouchers you collected.... Well done and thank you

Litter Pick

The Big Tidy Up
&

Wiltshire Wildlife Trust: John Bentley School joins forces with Trust in war on waste

Bird box repairs

We have started the New Year thinking about the local birds that come and visit our school, we noticed that the bird boxs' were in need of some repair.  Having checked on the RSPB website (click to visit) you can start cleaning the boxes from August until January. 


You can legally only remove unhatched eggs from bird box's between August and January and then they must be disposed of.


January is also "BIG GARDEN BIRDWATCH"  so log on to the RSPB website and start counting.

Mr Thornton took down the old bird box's, some were worst than others.

We removed all the nails and rotten wood, cleaned them out and set about repairing them.

The girls are fixing the lid to this bird box with salvaged material from an old blackboard,

The team, working hard at painting!
 

The birdbox's are now repaired, cleaned and painted, ready to put up!

Green Tomato Chutney

Mrs Bouchard's, green tomato chutney, that she made using our green tomatoes. Tastes delicious!