The Beauty of a Bee-Friendly Garden!
The bee-friendly flower beds and gardens in the school can provide nature with a home right in the heart of Camden! At Eleanor Palmer they grow plants they can eat and enjoy such as herbs, fruit, vegetables, and edible flowers! The bees love the flowers on these as much as they do! You will see herbs such as sage, thyme, rosemary, and lavender growing. They grow a wide variety of wildflowers, some of which are night scented. These help provide food for night flying moths too, which are now also endangered.
They do not use any chemicals on their plants. Instead, they improve the soil by using their own compost they make at the school. Their compost comes from the school’s garden waste, weeds, and fruit peel; all things that would have otherwise gone to landfill. Children at Eleanor Palmer mainly grow their own plants from seeds and cuttings. This not only keeps down costs but also helps to lessen their damage to the environment. Some of the big, bright flowering bedding plants you see in the shops, often use lots of water, compost and chemicals to get them to grow quickly and cheaply. But bees and butterflies can find their unnaturally complicated flowers difficult to get their pollen and nectar from.
As well as their flower borders, they have an allotment garden with 6 raised growing beds. The children grow a wide variety of fruit and vegetables over the growing season. They always ensure that there are wildflowers and companion plants in the vegetable borders too to draw in the pollinators.