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The wardens at Saltwells are creating a new tree nursery. Trees will be propagated from seed collected in Saltwells Wood. Last week we helped by starting to prepare the ground to put footpaths around the raised beds. Students worked hard digging out turf. The underlying clay soil was very dry and at first we struggled to get our spades into the soil. Then as luck would have it, the heavens opened and the rain softened up the soil making it easier to dig. Unfortunately, our luck changed again when what we hoped would a shower carried on until it became slippery under foot. This work will be continued after half term.

Last week before the change of timetable, sadly for some of our youngsters, it's the end of their John Muir journey. 5 of our youngsters have achieved their Explorer awards, which we are so proud of. Today we were finishing off a couple of seats for our newly re-wilded garden. The girls look rightly happy with the job they have done! It will get a coat of paint soon to protect it. The next few weeks will be celebrations of the group, (and the SLP group's) achievements, with a big outdoor cookout in the pipeline. We will keep you updated with how that goes.

Today we made pictures using nature from our surroundings. The pictures show artwork of images that can be seen around Whalsay. We have created a sheep in a 'cru' and a beach.

On Thursday the 1st of June we went to Christie Park with Andy Devine from West Dunbartonshire Community Greenspace. We made a shelter for creatures that live in the woods. Our hibernaculum will be a home for toads, insects, wood lice and even rodents! We had a fun day and enjoyed trying the different tools, we used a mallet, loppers, shovels and small hand saws. We liked being able to cut the bamboo and going up into the woods to find materials.

Fantastic 2 1/2 days with the Skern Training and Skills Outdoor team exploring the wonderful Lake District National Park, via canoes, kayaks and Stand up paddle boards, looking at how we can actively implement the John Muir award into our programs and how accessible it is to all our apprentices, Looking to conserve and protect the local environment we collected litter form shore lines to campsite, looking to minimise our impact on the natural habitats as well as learn about the vast valley which we were traveling through. All in all a fantastic experience exploring new places and great conversations had.

We joined Mary-Anne Cameron for the day at Balloch Castle Country Park. In the sweltering heat we carried out Opal surveys and identified lots of different insects, including a really high number of shield bugs. We then explored the park and had a chance to do some birdwatching.

We shared our identification skills with Primary 2. We went to Christie Park and taught them to carefully catch, identify and safely return insects. Our best spot was a White Ermine moth!