Gladesmore Gardening Crew #1.
By far the best part of the week is when the Gladesmoor gardening club, led by teacher Emma Beale, come to visit the garden on Friday lunchtimes.
The way we've designed the garden means it can be quite light touch a lot of the time — not too much need for side-by-side gardening. The kids love the wildlife: searching for newts, doing biodiversity reports and learning the calls of the local birds. But in the allotment area, everything changed. We soon realised that growing food together was the heart of the space.
Now we prep the ground and sow seeds in the spring, forage through the seasons and bring in the harvests in autumn. Pulling potatoes out of the ground is like finding gold. Sharing Japanese wine berries and Szechuan peppers is a connoisseur craft. We've realised the importance this brings to not just the kids but to us — getting our hands in the earth and learning the graft and patience it takes to grow food, together.
"Why Tottenham, it'll just get ruined? — We took that as a personal challenge. And recently that same girl declared, while pulling up vegetables: one day this garden could be as big as Kew Gardens."
— Emma Beale
The beauty of this garden is that even on the darkest, most miserable days — literally and metaphorically — it's about finding beauty and finding life. It's not about manicured flower beds. It's about understanding what a plant needs to survive, not about what we think it should look like.
It teaches us that things we might overlook and not place any worth on suddenly become significant and important. Every week it is freedom. This is an opportunity for the students to explore, to question. They learn how everything is linked together, they crush leaves in their fingers and think about what it reminds them of. The curiosity and exploration that comes with gardening club is then a skill that they can carry with them into classrooms — and forever.