Greenvale helps Suffolk primary school set the tone for UK school gardening clubs in Grow Your Own Potatoes 2008
Children from primary schools around the country have been celebrating after raising a healthy crop of potatoes as part of the national Grow Your Own Potatoes scheme for 2008. Schools have been growing one of the UK’s finest potato varieties, Vales Emerald, supplied by Greenvale, the largest fresh potato supplier in the UK.
Bucklesham School, near Ipswich in Suffolk, has a thriving number of after-hours clubs offering activities beyond the standard curriculum. By far the most popular is the gardening club, with 20 out of the school’s 100 children joining in the activity in a corner of the grounds.
"We started the club two years ago and it was an instant success", says teacher Susie Starke, who runs it from February to October.
"We focus mainly on growing fruit and vegetables, and the object is to help children understand where food comes from. The children not only see the food growing, but learn what has to be done to make sure it grows properly, and how to avoid pests eating the food. And they learn just how good food can taste when it’s fresh!"
The Grow Your Own Potatoes scheme ran for 16 weeks to the national harvest date of June 24th. Seed harvests throughout the UK will always vary due to climate conditions and latitude. For example, Scottish seed harvests are later than Southern England. Depending on where the school is located, the amount of the crop harvested and the size of the potatoes will have varied. However, a national date allowed the scheme to be coordinated amongst the schools.
Greenvale has been a key contributor to the Potato Council’s Grow Your Own Potatoes scheme. The company supplied the Council with four tonnes of the Vales Emerald variety of seed potatoes earlier this year, with the Council distributing them to schools throughout the UK. In a control sample for the scheme the Potato Council’s own experts managed to produce an exceptional crop of 3.125kg from just 6 or 7 Vales Emerald seed potatoes.
Gail Robertson, from Greenvale’s Seed Office in Perthshire, says they selected Vales Emerald for schools for a number of reasons. "It’s a cross between the traditional Maris and Charlotte, offering the best of both of them. It gives a good yield, is easy to grow, and tastes particularly good as a new potato, boiled potato or salad potato.
"It’s also got high tuber numbers." [Translation: you get a lot more potatoes from a single seed!]
"And it matures early – so it’s ideal for schools, which can thus get the harvest in before breaking up for the summer."
Gail adds: "Served properly, potatoes have fewer calories and less fat than fashionably healthy foods like rice and pasta. And they are a good source of healthy complex carbohydrates for primary school children."
Susie Starke says the gardening club was a key part of Bucklesham School’s commitment to the ‘healthy eating’ part of the National Healthy Schools Programme. The school received supplies of the seed potatoes in April, planting them in a corner of the school grounds, harvesting them in July.
long the way the children learned valuable lessons – the importance of a fertile soil, of controlling pests, of the right amount of watering, of choosing the right moment to harvest, and of course all the hard work involved in cleaning the potatoes and preparing them for cooking!
As harvest time neared, the children of Bucklesham’s gardening club noticed an infestation of snails, and this helped them became aware of how pests can affect crop, and how they can be controlled. The profusion of snail eggs in the school garden’s soil were a particular object of fascination, and a reminder to the children of all the work and knowledge that must go into farming to ensure that Britain’s potato crop remains healthy and productive.
For more information and details of local stockists of Vale’s Emerald and other varieties of fresh British potatoes, contact Greenvale on 01945 469840 or visit www.greenvale.co.uk.