Communities Fund has provided £1,040 of match funding
Little Chalfont Primary School Edible Garden
Amersham, England, United Kingdom
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Aim
Save our Incredible Edible Garden! We need you to help us grow! None of this will happen next year without your support...
Our Incredible Edible Garden project - green futures
At the heart of our community is a special space, where children sow and grow and eat everything! We have built a garden where every single child in our county primary school gets to experience outdoor learning many times a term, handling plants, seeds, soil, and turning them into something they can pick, eat, sustain and share. It brings children and families together, and as the seasons roll by we all learn and grow together.
Now we need your help. It has taken us 5 years with the support of our families and community to build our garden up into what it is now, transformed from an empty and plain grassy courtyard neglected at the back of school to a hidden magical oasis buzzing with life! We want all of this to continue - the teaching, the learning, the eating, the exploring, the togetherness, calm, joy and wonder.
Any donations you are able to give will go directly to the teaching, resources, equipment and garden that the children experience and enjoy.
What makes the garden so special
Watch our film! It really is a unique space nationally, there are not many schools that offer their pupils such a hands on and cross-curricular enrichment every term throughout the school year. Every child from Nursery's three-year-olds through to Year 6's eleven-year-olds gets to be immersed in our fantastic outdoor growing project, progressing through different crops each year that challenge and excite their age group.
We grow all sorts of edibles - roots, shoots, stems, leaves, fruit, seeds and flowers. Our beds burst with staples of potatoes, carrots, onions, beans, peas, beetroot, chard, leeks, sweetcorn and courgettes, there are flavour explosions with garlic, tomatoes, basil, chives, parsley, dill and mint, and many forms of fruit flourishing - with a mini orchard and espaliers of apples, a rhubarb patch, pyramidal strawberry tower, gooseberrries, blueberries, blackcurrants, figs, peaches, even juneberries and climbing mini-kiwis, plus a plethora of pretty flowers for our pollinators (as well as eating) - nasturtium, calendula, borage, chicory, dahlias and sunflowers. Exotically the garden even now has a banana tree, lemons, ginger, popcorn and a pineapple plant!
We plant hedgerow and native tree saplings in our grounds. We make bird boxes and bug hotels. We grow vertically and horizontally, in pots and pyramids, indoors and outdoors, on benches and in beds. We collect and juice apples from our community to make the most of summer abundance. We compost our garden and playing field organic materials, and our school food waste feeds our wormeries.
The garden supports all of this and so much more...
- maths - we count, measure, weigh, record, calculate, formulate, solve problems, use geometry, fractions, and percentages
- english - we describe, communicate, ask, exchange, dream, compose and create
- science - we think, hypothesise, test, observe, identify, deduce, understand, innovate and try
- design technology - we master tools, assemble, make, build, invent, rework, repair, recycle, reuse and reimagine
- arts - we craft, paint, sculpt, arrange, shape, growing dexterity and fine detailing
- geography - we engage with seasons, climate, biodiversity, hydrology, terrain, aspect, orientation, soils, lifecycles, habitats, botany, land use, agriculture, biomes and microbiomes
- history - we "Dig for Victory" and grow the "Three Sisters" like our ancestors
- physical education - we lift, stretch, carry, coordinate, jump, flex our motor skills and muscles
- food technology - we cook, combine, taste, smell, nibble, sample, seasonally savour and sell!
- SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) - it's a flourishing, colourful, happy, calm and sensory space for wellbeing, where every child can find emotional regulation and room to breathe.
Sometimes our crops don't come to fruition but we learn it's a stepping stone to success next time. Our children gather knowledge by doing, become resilient, persistent learners, who can achieve and have confidence to give new things a go.
We embed sustainability in everything we do, and aim to ensure our children are climate aware, connected to our planet, treading lightly and making choices that sustain our future. We reuse, repair, remake and recycle. We are peat-free, water-wise, chemical-free, pollinator-friendly, no-dig, soil-regenerating in our growing, We don't just grow here, its a place for complicated conversations, lifelong habits, and understanding how we can choose a better future.
Everyone is welcome and nurtured, children and adults alike learn skills together, make friendships, come together over healthy, low air-miles, naturally grown food, and share that joy with the wider world.
What your support will help us do
Your donations will help us Secure the garden, Share what we do and Sustain our learning. We want to be able to carry on doing everything we have been doing...and more.
Its contribution to school life has already been referenced in glowing terms in our recent Ofsted report. We want to build on our success but because of the immense pressure on school budgets, we need to find a new way outside of core school funds to finance and support the garden. None of this will continue unless we can find the funding for it to happen.
With support through this crowdfundraising we can ensure strong organisational structures and continue to engage a garden co-ordinator and teacher to plan, lead and deliver fantastic, engaging and high quality curriculum-linked learning sessions in the edible garden space, buy the equipment we need and deliver more formal and informal learning sessions for the children.
We can extend our activity all year round into the polytunnel with irrigation system, shade netting, materials storage and water harvesting.
Your support means we’ll be able to buy the peat-free compost, tools, seeds, bulbs and starter plants the children need to plant and nurture a huge variety of crops, and funds to undertake essential maintenance to the garden infrastructure including repairs to the greenhouse, raised beds, irrigation system, water butts, fencing, crop protection, orchard and hedgerow tree supports.
Funding will also allow us support "field to fork" and "plot to plate" classes and buy more cookery equipment, for cooking, preserving, eating and sharing what we grow.
What’s next for the garden?
We’d also love to start a pumpkin patch, an exotics corner, a herb garden and a soft fruit forage with edible hedgerows.
Our mini-builders would love to recycle timber into hedgehog homes, toad abodes, bat roosts and minibeast trapdoors, and if funds allow, invest in tech such as trail cameras and bat detectors to observe more closely the creatures we share the garden with!
We want to build stronger links with our local community, through open days, community and corporate volunteering opportunities, sponsorship partnerships and skills sharing masterclasses.
We want to ensure the long-term sustainability of the project, upskilling our community and gathering a wide pool of committed and knowledgeable participants.
We really want to be an exemplar model to share with others, linking with nearby schools and groups to launch and undertake similar projects, offering support and hosted visits and spearhead a network of Incredible Edible local food producers, as well as having staff resource to engage with other sustainable regenerative land use projects locally, for school visits out for the children - experiences at this age are remembered for life.
Long-term we'd love to be able to have a full-time rather than part-time funded gardening teacher position, so that all of this experience is completely integrated in the life of the school, the children can access the garden every day and we have the resource to extend and maintain our productive areas with the children.
The edible garden has been a truly wonderful and successful experiment LOVED by pupils, staff and parents alike - every school should have one!
How you can help
Thank you for reading this far! There are three simple ways to get involved and support our project:
1. Make a donation - soon!
Every unique supporter pledge on this page gets us closer to our goal. Please give generously as every £ you give is match-funded over the 6 weeks of the 2026 summer holidays to double your donation! This applies only to UNIQUE donations - repeat donations from the same name/account/bank will not be matched, and whilst you can continue to pledge after the summer holidays and we are grateful for everything, donations will only be matched by Aviva during the 6 weeks of our summer of garden love! So please use your pledge to best effect :)
2. Spread the word
Share our project with friends, family and your wider network. The more people we reach, the more likely we are to succeed - we are so grateful to each and every backer of this project, past and present, and our wider community of new friends!
3. Volunteer with us / donate materials & equipment / partner with or sponsor us!
If you’d like to get involved, we’d love to hear from you, there are so many opportunities to help us do what we do (and more) and grow your skills, experience and profile alongside ours. Please get in touch on [email protected] and visit our website at www.littlechalfontprimaryschool.co.uk/edible-garden-project/
Our weekly exploits are detailed on the back pages of the school newsletters which can be found by clicking here.
All of the funds raised by this crowdfunder will be held in a ring-fenced fund with the Little Chalfont Primary School Parent Teacher Association (LCPS PTA), registered charity 1066770, for the use of the Incredible Edible Garden project.
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 2nd September 2026 at 12:15pm