×

School’s greenhouse growing green thumbs

Submitted Photo Max eighth graders Carsen Kohler, Raegan Albert and Skyler Johnson work with succulents during a class in the Max Public School greenhouse.

Living with the cold during North Dakota’s often brutal winter months is just a fact of life in the upper Midwest, and greenhouses have become popular additions at a number of area schools.

Max High School agriculture instructor Amanda Huettke said the greenhouse has been a boon for the students and the staff, affording them ample opportunities to get hands-on experiences in cultivating and experimenting with a variety of plants throughout the year.

“We haven’t had it for very long, like five or six years maybe. We have a greenhouse that we use throughout the year to do transplants, cuttings, and grow plants and different things like that. They use it for some science classes as well. We have a community garden that we grow every year, so we use it for flowers and different things that we plant around town,” Huettle said.

The greenhouse is used to cultivate succulents, house plants, annual flowers, and few vegetables. Members of the Max community use the greenhouse in the early spring to get their vegetable plants started before transplanting them in their home gardens.

Huettl said the greenhouse is available to all Max students, but is used quite frequently by the second- and fourth-grade educators for various lessons.

“They are starting to become more common.There are a lot of schools that have them. We did a lot of fundraising for ours and did a lot of grant writing. The school did pay for some of it too. There was a committee that was put together that did a lot of grant writing and collected donations that were put towards it.”

The greenhouse itself is 20 feet by 35 feet in size, and includes an attached headroom/classroom space where the students can work on their plants before placing them.

“It gives students a real opportunity to deal with plants and with their different growth stages. It allows students to have a hands-on opportunity in a greenhouse setting,” Huettl said. “We’ve had some students conduct some agriscience research in there over the years on different fertilizers or how different plants grow in different light settings. A wide variety of those kinds of things.”

Huettl said the greenhouse also provides additional opportunities beyond education during the wintertime as a space for classes to have “brain break” or take in the sunshine.

“Our English teacher, she’ll come down in the wintertime and they’ll (class) just sit in the greenhouse and read if it’s a reading day just to get out and get some sunlight and not be out in the freezing cold. It serves a little mental health, a little vitamin D for everybody.”

Starting at $2.99/week.

Subscribe Today