Spitalfields City Farm

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Families Go Wild in the Garden!

It was another confusing weather day today - we couldn’t figure out if we felt hot or cold, and then it started raining! Luckily our task was portable, so we moved into a sheltered part of the garden.

First of all though, we got to taste some of the tomatoes we’ve been growing this season! We hunted amongst the tomato leaves to find ripe red tomatoes, and then we ate them! They were delicious, especially since we had grown them ourselves!

Once we had eaten our tasty tomatoes, it was time to get down to work! The first task was to harvest some potatoes. We had grown our potatoes in bags this season, so we dug around in the bags of compost to try and find potatoes. We knew they were ready to harvest, as the leaves of the plants had died back.

We dug through the bags and found three different varieties of potatoes that we had planted! It was like a game, digging in the bags and finding treasure! We collected a lot of potatoes of all different sizes, and we also found loads of creepy crawlies. We saw woodlice, a slug, worms, centipedes, and lots of snails.

Once we had found all the potatoes, we emptied the compost from the bags, so we could re-use it for different plants in the future. Then, we had to do some weeding, and collect some mature pea pods from the plants we had grown.

It was like another game, looking for pea pods! We found quite a few, and emptied the peas into a cup. We will now let them dry out completely, and then we can store them and plant them next year.

Once we had weeded and collected the dry peas, we had a look in the pond for fish. We saw lots of goldfish and pond skaters. After that our younger volunteers played together around the farm, while their parents had a chat. It was lovely to see everyone getting along so well and enjoying the farm in their own way. We’re looking forward to our Families Go Wild Harvest Festival, when we’ll cook up and eat the potatoes we harvested, as well as making pizza to celebrate!