Goat Lees Community Orchard Project

Another fantastic project that has come about from us having a successful bid from The Tree Council Grant was the planting of our Community Orchard.

Along with the hedgerow, we were lucky enough to have funds to purchase 18 fruit trees: 4 different varieties of apple, 3 different varieties of pear, 2 varieties of plum tree, a cherry tree and an apricot tree. Two volunteer members of staff and I, along with some of our children from the Roots & Shoots Club, took on the hard task of digging in all of the trees, and two lengthy after-school sessions later, we managed to plant them all.

Then came the task of caring for them and making sure they didn’t dry up, so every day, the children watered them. This was no mean feat as it was an extremely dry Summer, but we were rewarded with a small crop of fruit in harvest season. Obviously, this was the first year and the saplings had just been planted, so we were not expecting much, but the Roots & Shoots Club children never missed a day of watering, so it was nice that they were able to sample some home-grown apricots, apples and pears.

We have now had a parent offer to help us prune them correctly so that we can get them to produce the best harvest they can. Now we want to build two large bug houses to encourage more insects – bees, butterflies and ladybirds – to help pollinate our trees, and keep down the unwanted pests. The children will be making sketches of their design ideas, and then we will be looking at ways of gathering materials to make them.

Everyone is now very excited to see what we get next year! Hopefully, the trees will mature nicely and produce a bigger harvest so that parents, children and anyone visiting the school can sample our wares because, as we said in the beginning, this is our Goat Lees Community Orchard – open to all.