the buzz of excitement...

So we had a garden at school and a team of young healthy students keen to learn more about the self sufficiency way of life, we Ok they were enjoying every minute spent using real tools and digging holes for all sorts of uses.  This enthusiasm boosted the growing range at home and our garden in Welling was looking really lush and bursting with the blossom of crab apples, plum, pear, apple, blackberry, raspberry and a wide range of seedlings now coming up and reaching for the sunlight to grow into healthy strong vegetables and salad crops.  The students began asking questions, as they do with their juvenile spongelike brains desire for details, can we have some chickens? Can Simon fit his head inside the watering can and still speak? How will we get the flowers (blossom) to turn into apples? Can i go to the toilet with my wellies on?  The usual range of deep thinking was evident.
The answer to the first took up 3 lessons in attempts to gain a team understanding of the needs of chicken keeping and working out a rota for who was going to pop in at the weekends to feed, water and collect their eggs.  Can't they just stop laying at weekends?
So we still had a way to go with the farm part of urban farming but we certainly had the green fingered touch and were sprouting veg all over the place.  So we set about helping the group understand how the blossom becomes fruit and veg.  Following the most amazing beekeeping course for staff which you can see all the video diaries for by clicking this link, we homed our first swarm of bees in a hive in a roughly constructed apiary.  Yes that took a bit of explaining that bees not apes live in an apiary, anyway we had them in situ and had the training to look after them and draw off the annual honey harvest. Soon after a second colony followed which was a swarm we gathered from the nearby allotments and these were homed in the streetgrowers garden in Welling.