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He is just one of the pupils at Britannia Village Primary School in east London who have been putting the finishing touches to the new educational garden there.

Fruit and veg are grown in the garden

The area will provide the school with fresh fruit and vegetables which will be grown in a sustainable way so the children can learn about looking after the environment.

Joshua explained how the mud where he is putting his plant will become more bog-like.

“There are these containers of water and if they overflow it will water this area.”

Plastic bottle greenhouse

Recycling is a key theme at the Silvertown school’s latest asset.

The garden’s designer, Julia Hilton, from Green Dreams, has come up with a number of imaginative ways of reusing everything from plastic bottles to rain water.

And her schemes have proved not only environmentally friendly, but cost-effective too.

The garden uses green ideas

One of the most imaginative and budget-saving ideas is a greenhouse which has walls made out of plastic bottles, threaded onto canes.

Clean energy

“The children have been saving bottles all summer,” she said, “This should work very well as a green house as the air gets trapped inside the bottles so it gets warm.”

But there is still a little way to go to complete the greenhouse – Julia estimates in total they’ll need 1500 plastic bottles to fill all four walls that will fit in the timber frame.

There is also an innovative watering system which uses very clean energy indeed to power it.

The garden teaches children about nature

Julia said: “They wanted originally a solar powered wheel, but I thought ‘well you've got children power, which is even more straight forward, so let’s use them’”.

Local funding

The water collected in two huge recycled containers is fed into a gully which a waterwheel sits above.

The waterwheel has buckets on it, which when turned by the children, scoop up the water and feed it into a pipe which can be moved to the area that needs watering.

Funding for the garden has come from local charity the East Foundation.