Smarty Pants

Our smallest and youngest students look at the newly hatched tadpoles.  They have learned the life cycle of the frog and were delighted to see our tadpoles. They are students at SMARTY PANTS Montessori (PHONE 086 2116050) here in our school.  They will be participating in planting veg for the Incredible Edibles and have their own veg patch.  Laura and Michelle have helped them plant daffodil bulbs last October and these are now in flower. They are a very enthusiastic bunch of children, fascinated by all around them.

Robin's nestbox

This is what a robin's nestbox looks like, a robin likes to nest in ivy in a box with a big entrance so she can look out at what is going on.

LOOK UP!

LOOK UP above the window at Mr Sheehys room, our bird box with web cam is set up. It is linked to a TV in Mr Sheehys room. See the two white panels on the sides of the box.  These are to let extra light into the box and allow us to see clearly what is going on.  The box is up just in time as birds will be scouting for places to nest and blue tits will be looking from mid April to the end of April.  The box is most likely to provide a home for blue tits as the size and type of the entrance determines what bird will use it.  Remember the robin box and how different it looks.

Watch for birds going into and coming out of the box over the next few weeks.

Goldfinch and blue tit.

These photos were taken by Diane Purtell in her sister's garden. Both birds are commonly seen in our school garden.  The goldfinches are the ones with a red face  and black and white head and very pronounced yellow band on the wings.  These are regularly seen in our school garden.  A family of goldfinches were in the garden all last summer and during the winter they fed every day on the seeds inside the Alder cones. They are becoming more common in and around Rush.  In the next few weeks they will be feeding on the seeds of the dandelions.  Look for them on the motorway feeding on the grass verges when you see the dandelion seed heads called "clocks".

The blue tit is also a regular and common visitor to the garden they are an active and very agile bird often seen hanging upside down on branches picking insects from the underside of branches.  They feed on insects, small seeds and berries. They nest in small holes in trees walls and love to nest in nesting boxes.  I hope that a pair will discover and nest in our box with the webcam.

Winter in the School garden

There was 16cm of snow in the school in December.

PLANT NAMES

Why do we give plants names? How are plants named?

Unless we have order in the naming of plants different people would give plants a name they thought suitable but no one would know exactly which plant was being referred to.

A man called Linnaeus came up with a system and this system is used to this day.  Latin is the language used in naming plants.  Each plant is given a specific name and this way a plant can be identified accurately by any gardener in the world.

This starts with
Family name:         Fagaceae
Genus:                    Fagus
species:                   sylvatica
Subspecies:
Variety & Forma:
Cultivar:                 "Aurea Pendula"

This tells me that the plant is a Beech tree with yellow leaves and branches that hang down.
Not all the headings are used with every plant every time but every plant, animal, insect and living thing is named using the same method.

Ivy in the garden.

We have a large clump of ivy (Latin name Hedra helix) growing on the perimiter fence near the compost bays.  Many people try to remove ivy thinking that it is unsightly or a nuisance.  It may be unwanted if it is growing on a building but it is an invaluable plant in nature. Like many plants it has two types of growth, slim stems with aerial roots which grip strongly to a surface and help the plant to grow upwards towards light and a more branch like growth which is called Hedra arboresens, this part of the plant flowers and produces fruit containing the seeds.

Ivy is also a very important plant as it flowers in the Autumn providing a rich supply of pollen at a time when many other plants have finished flowering. It then produces fruit in spring as you can see from the photo above. These fruit are a great source of food for birds.

Last Autumn we saw that the ivy had a huge number of butterflies feeding on the flowers. Also wasps, hoverflies and flies were plentiful on the ivy.  These insects themselves are food for birds.
So you see ivy is a very useful plant in the garden.

WHAT OTHER PLANTS HAVE DIFFERENT KINDS OF  LEAVES ON THE SAME PLANT.