In the summer term at Richard Challoner School in Kingston, all Year 8 students worked on a project that combined ICT with gardening. We had to investigate whether it was feasible to grow enough vegetables in the school garden to make a profit. We used control software to monitor conditions in a greenhouse, a spreadsheet model to calculate profit, and created mail merge letters and flyers for marketing.

Having a school garden fits in with the Government’s Healthy Eating policy, Food Tech because we peeled the parsnips we’d grown for curried parsnip soup and Action On Waste because we reused plastic bottles on bamboo poles to scare birds away from eating our vegetables.

The charity School Food Matters and our local Waitrose in Kingston invited us to sell our vegetables in their foyer at the end of term. We took along some vegetable plants too and our Jalapeno pepper plants were most popular. We sold absolutely everything and made £222.20 for our gardening project!

We realised how tiring it was to stand up and work hard for several hours but everyone worked as a team. Customers included MP Zac Goldsmith. Visitors commented on how polite, smart, and cheerful we were, and that we were a credit to our school.