Grow your own grub winners 2022

A huge well done to all of the schools who took part in our annual grow your own grub competition in 2022. Here is a breakdown of all of our winners and runners up. Thanks to everyone who took part and help to make the event such a success.

Further information

Well done to everyone who took part in the grow your own grub mealbarrow competition 2022!

The event was a great success, and the largest to date, with 23 schools taking part! Despite the rain, we also had 150 visitors to Abbey Pumping Station on Saturday. It was wonderful to see all the mealbarrows coming together for the celebration and we all thoroughly enjoyed seeing the creative ideas that you had all come up with! It goes without saying that this has been a challenging year so the Sustainable Schools Team, along with Food for Life, The Conservation Volunteers and Public Health would like to issue a massive congratulations to all participants. Your drive and passion have been wonderful to see.

The competition was made up of three key parts: menu design, school grounds growing and the public vote. The results from these three subcategories were then combined to find our overall 1, 2 and 3 place schools. 

Overall competition winners

1st place - Taylor Road Primary School 

'They have made really good use of a small areas. The school has no real green space and have used containers to grow a variety of produce.’

'They have multiple bee-friendly plants, again making great use of small space.’

2nd place - Nurturing Roots Group 

‘Great use of site with everywhere being planted, including use of succession cropping and polycropping.’

‘The crop varieties were absolutely fantastic! There were crops growing that we had never seen before: ‘yukon’ was one, and a child introduced us to eating the seed pods of rocket.’

3rd place - St Patrick's Catholic Voluntary Academy 

‘They are still developing the area but have grown in pots around the space.’

'Multiple environmental practices were noted during the visit including using a water butt, introducing bug hotels and ensuring there are bee-friendly plants throughout.’

Mealbarrow Public Vote

We had almost 150 votes submitted at Abbey Pumping Station on Saturday. Visitors were very impressed with the range of crop and the inventiveness of the submissions.

The Top 3 places are awarded to:

1. Nurturing Roots Group 

2. Taylor Road Primary School 

3. Stokes Wood Primary School and St Patrick's Catholic Voluntary Academy 

Menu design 

Our colleagues at the Leicestershire Nutrition and Dietetics Service with Food for Life judged the menus on:

• Nutritional value
• Presentation
• Creativity and appeal

All submissions were of a high quality with inventive and tasty dishes. Overall, there were three stand out entries each gaining full marks.

St Patrick's Catholic Voluntary Academy 

Sandfield Close Primary School 

Oaklands School 

School grounds award

All schools were visited by members of the team to assess various elements of the school grounds growing area. The criteria were:

• Use of site – how the available space has been used and how it fits in to the wider school site.
• Condition of cultivation – how well the area is maintained.
• Crop – not solely based on size or abundance of crop but on the suitability of the crop for the site and how it will be used.
•  X-Factor – demonstration of how the competition is integrated into teaching and the food growing is included in the curriculum.
• Environmental practice – use of environmentally friendly practices such as planting for pollinators, use of peat-free compost and rainwater harvesting.

All the judges were impressed with the quality of growing areas on show and each school received a Gold, Silver or Bronze award as seen below.