Archived News

25th April 2008

Thankfully the sun was shining this morning as we welcomed Year 3 and 4 pupils from our local school, Abinger Common First School. Laurence arrived in his combine harvester, which created a good talking point.

The children have been studying farming methods in Uganda and in particular the growing of maize.  We showed the contrast of growing maize in England, everything from drilling the maize through to harvesting and the need for drying the maize because it is normally harvested in November. 

We talked about  the maize which we are growing under bio-degradable plastic and how this technique should warm up the soil and help the seed to germinate weeks earlier than usual. To find out whether this was working, Laurence made a small hole in the plastic and the children compared the temperature of the soil beneath the plastic with the soil outside.

There was quite a difference in temperature, the soil under the plastic felt very warm and we could see maize seeds sprouting.  This is very encouraging for us because this is quite an expensive ‘experiment’ which will hopefully bring the maize harvest forward to the end of September, reducing the need to dry the crop quite so much (if the weather is kind!) and enabling us to get a further crop into the ground after the maize.

What I found particularly rewarding about this school visit was that the children are all local, enthusiastic about the countryside and brimming with local anecdotes, my favourite being about a swan which had been forced away from the Kingfisher Farm Shop lake by two Canada geese, but we shouldn’t worry because the swan was now on a lake at the little girl’s grandmother’s house!

Being so local, the children will have the opportunity to see how the maize progresses and it will mean so much more to them with their newfound knowledge about growing maize in contrasting parts of the World. I hope they will return to see what else is happening on their local farm.