10 Green Bottle recycled Greenhouse and Bridgend SMILE project

I was fortunate to be invited to the award ceromony of SMILE in Bridgend recreation centre last month and met Claire George.

Claire is an IT Lecturer at Bridgend College and has received the ‘Most Enterprising Teacher Award 2009' from the education team at Enterprise UK, the campaign to increase entrepreneurial behavior in the UK.
Claire has worked with 5 primary schools which entered into the SMILE (Students Motivate Innovative Learning via Enterprise’) project and has plenty of more ideas for further projects.Claire with her fellow colleagues in the construction academy from Bridgend college are going to build a 10 green bottle recycled greenhouse in a local primary school annually.

Claire approached me "Our Welsh Farm" to come along and help the pupils plant some seeds ready for the greenhouse. I attended the school and with the pupils made some recycled plant pots from newspaper and the children planted salad leaf seeds these they were going to take home.

We then used the bottoms of the 2litre bottles that had been discarded from the build and planted these up we had a talk about the properties of wool and put some raw fleece in the bottom of the seed planters as an experiment we are hoping that by watering daily the moisture will last in the pot by absorption in the fleece to save the caretaker watering over the weekends we will let you know the outcomes......

Below are the photos we took and along with the seeds and weeds club hoping to have a project with pumpkins in the autumn.

We are very grateful to FACE http://www.face.org.uk/ and the NFU for the seeds

Our Welsh Farm visit to Llangewydd Primary

Thanks to Llangewydd Primary for letting me visit with Freddie and Pillow, we all had a great time although Freddie was a little restless. Both lambs love their new names and certificates have been sent to school.

There was a vote in each class and the most popular won.

The school had the theme "keen to be green" so we discussed the properties of wool and it's uses.
They were given seeds to grow and we discussed food miles on a lamb dinner and the benefits of local and fair trade food.

Shearing time 2010

It's that time of year again.

Am working on putting a kit together to take to schools to make felt.

We have just sheared our Jacob ewe and now know why they are kept for wool the fleece is 4 kg twice as heavy as our normal BFL (Blue Faced Leicester) ewes.

I bet she is feeling cooler now!

We have plenty of fleeces for sale please contact us if you wish to buy.

Dawn the kid and our pet lamb now named FluffyBelle (by Little Fingers after school club in Evanstown) have been around and about visiting local playgroups and they were very well behaved.

Dawn took a likig to the kid in the mirror at Tumble tots and had a good rummage through the Fancy dress section!!

New Puppy , new kid

Lots happening even though lambing nearly over, we have a new puppy called Jen and Molly the Sannan Goat has had a female kid called Dawn.




I have visited Bryncethin and Abercerdin Schools and hope they are following us on the website. The children in Abercerdin were excited to hear their own voices as they helped me with the "hear some facts" section.

Lambing Live at Our Welsh Farm

Just over half way on this set of ewes 200 left to lamb, do join us on http://www.ourwelshfarm.co.uk/ and log in to see our webcams in the shed.
We have Steven on works experience from Bridgend College and our children are on Easter holidays so all hands on deck.
The weather has been a bit extreme - sun, rain , sleet and snow all in 2 hours....................
It is brightening and warming now and the fields have turned from yellow to lush green and the ewes and lambs are loving it.

Quads

Sheep Fleece what can we do with it?

A secondary school has explored natural textiles. A fleece from our sheep was attached to the teachers wooden sheep and the all clipped and processed it into different products It was spun , weaved and felted.
The website was used as a resource if you want to contact us to sign up for this resource please contact us

info@ourwelshfarm .co.uk

Wool and lambs

The wool initiative by Prince Charles has had an impact into school life we have been asked for fleeces for spinning and felting projects within the classroom. If you need to purchase fleeces we still have some left please contact us.

Lambing is happening quickly, Sunday morning was not peaceful as 15 sets of twins caused a bit of confusion with their mothers this morning but all sorted now

Please contact us to subscribe to Our Welsh Farm web interaction and live camera in lambing shed. This is funded for all in rural Bridgend.

We have the sun out and I think spring is here.........