Chelsea garden has important messages for children

The Miracle-Gro Urban School Garden will feature at the 2016 RHS Chelsea Flower Show with an edible garden designed around school playground themes. The aim is to show a wide variety of edible flowers, fruit bushes and attractive vegetables and how they can green a grey Britain.

The garden will show the added benefits that can be obtained from Greening Grey Britain as it highlights how a community garden with this amount of diversity would enable everyone to enjoy 5-a-day, improve their health and happiness and help to create more fresh food fans.

Using scientific tests pupils from more than a hundred primary and secondary schools have been growing carrots and cabbages under fair test conditions to learn how feeding and growing media affect the final crops of everyday vegetables.

Statistical results of their trials and typical plants will be shown within two areas of the playground areas, a three swing frame will show the results of the school’s cabbage-growing experiment and a climbing frame will support results from their carrot experiments.

Raised beds in a hop-scotch shaped vegetable patch will display the benefits of 5-a-day and a full sized children’s slide construction with lettuce steps, red lettuce top platform and sweeping slope of red and green saladings will show how attractive a ‘slide-salad’ can be.

New varieties of existing edibles will show how breeders are improving the taste and variety of our food crops.

The Miracle-Gro’wers Academy at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show will be based in the Discovery Area at the show.