A scheme being run by the UK Potato Council for schools is the Grow Your Own Potatoes programme.  As Fizz is a child minder then she signed up her business for the programme in order to run through the activities with the mindees she has during the day.  Of course, T&J are most excited too and it is all such a great idea.   In the kit we received potato bags, six potatoes (three each of different variety), a poster to fill in each day of the growing session, weather watch and rain catcher, plus a load of teaching resources.  Taken from their website:

A project that teaches primary aged children about potatoes. With almost 1 million primary school children benefitting from this classroom experience linked to the UK curricula, children learn how potatoes grow and how they fit in to a healthy balanced diet. All you have to do is register your school to receive a FREE potato growing kit, use the supporting lesson plans and worksheets and for a chance to win fabulous prizes for your school, enter the competition once you have harvested.

Today, according to the poster, today was the start date.    The idea for today, after we had put a sticker on the weather chart for today, was to place the three Rocket seed potatoes and the three Vales Emerald seed potatoes in an egg box for chitting for two weeks.   I’ve only ever chitted seed potatoes once before, it must have had been the only one year that I was organised to actually have time to do so!   We talked about what chitting was all about, gave the children a potato each to find the best looking possible sprouting shoot, and popped them into the egg box.  We leave them now on the window sill….