Today we visited Canalside farm to start our Geography topic. We had a fantastic day!
We started by looking at where the strawberries are usually grown and talking about how during the winter months we can only enjoy strawberries if we import them, due to our climate here in the UK. We discovered some interesting facts, such as strawberries on the farm need watering every hour during the summer and that they are the only fruit with seeds on the outside. We also had a tour of where the raspberries, blackberries and boysonberries grown during the summer months.
We then walked through the maze and talked about how every country in the world grows sweetcorn apart from Antarctica! We looked at the different variety of pumpkins and found out that even though the smaller, knobbly ones looked amazing, they actually don’t taste very nice. The larger and more orange, the most tasty! We also were surprised to learn that pumpkins actually float as they have such a high water content. The farmers at Canalside will use the rotting pumpkins left over to fertilise the soil ready for next years crops. We spent time in the field picking our own pumpkins. Some could fit in our palm, whilst others were too heavy to lift! We were able to take a few pumpkins home along with a recipe card to make our own soup.
Our visit ended with a tour of the bakery, where we went ‘behind the scenes’ in the kitchen and saw the huge mixers they use to bake such large quantities of bread. We looked at the items in the shops and discussed which ones we can grow here, which ones are grown at other farms and which foods we have to import due to our climate.
It was a really exciting day and we can’t wait to learn more at school about how far some of our food travels.