Growing their own at Shenley Fields Daycare and Nursery School
Shenley Fields is a nursery school in Birmingham with 141 pupils. Using the Nature Park programme they've transformed their site, creating a community vegetable garden, a wildflower area, a bright flower garden and a green roof. Let’s hear about their journey!
To kickstart their Nature Park journey, Shenley Fields took part in the Habitat Heroes activity, discovering the homes for wildlife already present at their nursery. Both children and teachers took part and enjoyed looking closely around their outdoor space.
Making decisions
After the littlest learners had explored their outdoor space through Habitat Heroes, the teachers drew up the nursery grounds on the Habitat Mapper tool, creating their baseline map. This helped them decide what habitat enhancements to create, making their 'grey' concrete space greener. The nursery staff identified that they would like to create a vegetable garden to grow and share fruit and vegetables with parents and the local community.
We used the space at the front of our building as this was a space that we thought would have the most impact turning grey to green and increasing biodiversity on our site.
Louise Shepherd, Deputy Head
Shenley Fields Nursery School before and after
The impact of the changes
The nursery created a vegetable garden with 21 different types of fruits and vegetables. Parents can pick the vegetables and fruit and take them home, making the nursery pick up at the end of the day more pleasant, and helping to develop community cohesion.
Lovely opportunity for the children to experience planting and growing for the nursery community."
Parent
In front of the school, Shenley Fields have installed a bright flower garden to attract pollinators and boost staff wellbeing when walking into the school. Children have the space to explore nature and learn about plants. Every day in groups they plant, weed, water and observe the changes taking place right in front of them.
Hopes for the future
Shenley Fields hope to develop their community garden to share more food with the local community. They also aim to use what they grow for snacks and for cooking with the children.
In the long term the nursery hope they will be able to create less separation between the outside and the inside as they continue their journey to green their school and improve staff knowledge and confidence.