What an honour to be featured on the front page of The Sunday Times - Home section chatting all things gardening with children and highlighting the importance of Children's Gardens and clubs.

Join us for our September open day to enjoy our glorious Dahlias and abundant veg . There will be gardening inspired activities, live music, craft stalls and homemade cakes. Fun for all the family. We can't wait to see you.

Lara is thrilled to be a speaker at Yeo Valley's very first Garden Festival at 11:15am on Saturday 20th September on The Germination Station stage, sharing top tips to engage children in the garden with a slide show of how she turned a negleted allotment in her village into a thriving, magical and colourful children's garden. Lara will also be running a microgreen milk carton planing workshop throughout the day. Can't wait to see you there.

Lara shares her story of how she got into gardening and then created the Skool Beanz Children’s Allotment which runs after school, weekend and holiday Gardening Clubs.

With a Q&A afterwards, this is the perfect opportunity to bring together anyone interested in gardening with children, whether you’re a teacher, parent or grandparent. Get ideas and put them into action for the growing year ahead.

We are proud to offer adult day courses for anyone interested in starting a children's gardening club, creating a children's garden or just looking for top tips on how to engage little beanz in the garden. No gardening experience required. Everyone welcome aged 18+.

Sun 23 March

Sun 27 April

Sun 25 May

Sun 15 June

Sun 13 July

Sun 12 October

10am - 4pm. £95 Lunch included.

We love this joyful design of the Skool Beanz Allotment by talented illustrator Rachel Akerman. So much detail including Bobjon and Barbara Scarecrows, Secret Den, Quiet Wildlife Garden, Muddy Buddy compost heap, veg and flower beds.

What an honour to be on the front cover of Permaculture Magazine. We love spreading the Skool Beanz joy and hope that sharing our story will inspire others. This issue celebrates community gardening, our favourite kind of gardening. 

Lara was thrilled to talk to the lovely Shannon @diaryofaladygardener flying the flag for Skool Beanz and children's gardening on her brilliant 'The Lady Gardeners' podcast. Hope you enjoy.

Skool Beanz was thrilled to design a children's garden for this legendary show. We pulled out all the stops, recreating all the favourite must haves from our original Skool Beanz allotment. This children's garden included a quiet wildlife garden with dead hedge and secret den, a polytunnel kindly provided by First Tunnels, water collecting station, Muddy Buddy compost heap, No-Dig veg beds, raised beds, bath tubs, and toilet planters, upcyled art by Yeovil Creatives and 'Imagine, Learn and Create' and lots of colourful plants generously sponsored by Brimsmore Garden Centre. Big thanks to everyone who helped build and put this together. What an experience!

Lara from Skool Beanz is honoured to be speaking at this online event. Are you a gardening club leader, teacher, parent, or grandparent? Would you like to start a gardening club or create a children’s garden in your local community? With a panel of experienced children’s gardening creators and teachers, this is a place to share ideas and top tips on how to inspire the next generation of gardeners. Charles Dowding will introduce the forum and our panel of speakers. Each speaker will give an overview of their project, once everyone has spoken we will have a Q&A session. Start time is 11.30am GMT and we expect to finish at 1pm

Another pinch ourselves moment this summer was when the Willy Wonka of Veg and my old boss, mentor and friend Charles Dowding came to film a holiday gardening club. The sun shone and the children helped Charles pick fruit, veg and flowers. A wonderful morning we will never forget.

A pinch ourselves moment was welcoming the Gardener's World team and community gardening hero Tayshan Hayden - Smith to spend a couple of days with us on the Skool Beanz allotment filming some of the activities we get up to. In true English summer style, it absolutely poured down on the second day of filming but that didn't dampen the little beanz spirits and we hope the magic and joy we experience from gardening shines through your tv screens.

Thank you National Garden Scheme for publishing this article I wrote about the reasons behind starting Skool Beanz and why I'm so passionate about teaching gardening to children.

Thank you so much to the Sherborne Times for featuring us and sharing the Skool Beanz joy.

Biggest thanks goes to garden writer extraordinaire Matt Biggs for seeking me out and writing this lovely article about my gardening story and the reasons why I'm so passionate about teaching children the joys of gardening.