Skool Beanz the no dig garden for kids Lara Honnor passes on skills for life by teaching local children the joy of growing food and being outdoors All photos © Lara Honnor Feeding the birds is an important activity each week. The bird feeder is situated at the Skool Beanz entrance for all the children and residents to enjoy watching. The children decorated the bird bin with acrylic pens. Skool Beanz is a gardening club for children aged 4-13 years old, run from our very own children’s no dig allotment in the village of Chilthorne Domer, near Yeovil in South Somerset. The children learn how to grow delicious vegetables and beautiful cut flowers, and how to garden to help nature with plenty of upcycled art and fun. We run after-school, holiday and Saturday clubs. The idea of creating Skool Beanz came after I had just completed a diploma in Social and Therapeutic Horticulture at Coventry University. Greta Thunberg and her Fridays for Futures movement was all over the news. I found her incredibly inspiring: young people around the world standing up for our planet and speaking more sense than most adults. I realised if I teach children how to garden, not only will it improve their mental and physical wellbeing, it will help our precious nature too. In the same month of finishing my diploma, I contacted the primary school in my village and offered to volunteer and run a Friday after-school gardening club. Thus, Skool Beanz was created. The club went from strength to strength, then Covid struck. A parish councillor wanted to get the neglected village allotments (conveniently situated opposite the school) in use again and he encouraged me to take one on for our gardening club. It then dawned on me: children’s learning gardens do not officially exist where parents can easily book their child in for a club. We have the RHS, National Trust, forest schools, petting farms and playgrounds but no gardens designed especially for children that are fun, colourful and engaging; where they can learn to garden, taking into consideration their size, interests and attention spans! This was going to be the perfect lockdown project. Our new plot measured 6 by 30 metres and was overgrown with raspberry and blackberry canes, mare’s tail, couch grass, bindweed and great tufts of grass, not to mention the usual plastic, metal and glass rubbish left on allotments by previous tenants. Kind local farmers gave me used black polythene to suppress the weeds and they tipped masses of manure over the hedge for free. I put a call out to the village asking for cardboard and used my savings to buy deliveries of council compost. If tree surgeons were clearing and chipping the sides of roads, they would deliver a mountain of woodchip within an hour after I explained the project to them. The entire plot was covered with cardboard, manure and a issue 12 2  winter 2024 |  5