Escalante Middle School students are running a warm and flourishing hydroponic indoor oasis for their hand-grown plants and herbs this winter – and their bounty is stocking the school cafeteria and shelves at Durango Natural Foods.
For the past nine years, Durango School District agriculture teacher Lu Boren has been teaching students how to grow, care for, repurpose and sell the herbs and plants they’ve raised in the school’s greenhouse agriculture class.
Seventh and eighth graders were working on harvesting their flourishing rows of seed-grown chamomile, calendula, lemon balm, lettuce and basil in class Wednesday at Escalante Middle School. Strawberries will join the cornucopia of plants once some of the existing crops are harvested, Boren said, and once they’re ripe, they’ll be turned into strawberry jam.
Though the class has been operating at Escalante – and previously at Miller Middle School – for nearly a decade, the 10 individual hydroponic units were new additions in the last two years, Boren said. The class previously used one larger hydroponic unit that was more difficult to work with and allowed less space for planting.
Each new unit boasts 288 holes to house plants, she said – meaning students are now able to grow nearly 3,000 plants at a time in the classroom.
Selling the plants is a goal in the class – but it’s not the only valuable use of the students’ hard work, Boren said.
Several students worked on making pesto sauce Wednesday with their harvested basil while another dehydrated chamomile buds for tea. Boren’s daughter-in-law also uses some of the herbs for her homemade tallow, and Boren takes any plant scraps home to her chickens.
“It ends up being so much more than just a plant, you know?” she said.
Students are responsible for each step of maintaining their plants and hydroponic units, from logging progress, to conducting pH testing of the water and ensuring electrical conductivity are at the right levels for optimal growth, to cleaning the hydroponic system and ensuring the built-in water pump in the unit is working well.
“They’re responsible for all of it, and I consider myself to be support services,” Boren said.
Eighth grader Delia Shostak said the class teaches more than just how to grow plants – it fosters responsibility and encourages students to think of others.
“Part of it is learning how to provide for yourself, and part of it is learning how to do stuff for your community instead of just for yourself,” she said as she harvested chamomile from one of the hydroponic units. “You know, it’s responsibility and taking care of living things and keeping track of stuff. Staying on top of your responsibilities is a hard thing to learn.”
Though students work hard to properly care for their plants, mistakes do happen, Boren said – and learning from those mistakes is a valuable part of the process.
She recalled a group from last year that had a mishap with a unit water pump, which caused their strawberry plants to die and the pump to become damaged.
“(They) completely burned up the pump and killed all the strawberries, and it was kind of heartbreaking,” she said. “But to me, that’s literally what agriculture is all about: Sometimes you can’t get the seeds to come up, or one year a long time ago, we got flies that killed our crop. And I tell the kids, ‘You know, things happen – it’s not a perfect system.’ I feel like we learn as much from the failures – or more – as we do from the successes.”
Eighth graders June Housley, Ella McCoy and Riley Queen were some of the students making homemade pesto sauce out of their harvested basil plants in class Wednesday. They discussed how much they enjoy the class as they measured, mixed and blended their ingredients. The group intended to use the sauce for a pasta dish.
“We usually make the pesto and then all the noodles and stuff, and then one day we just have a little meal,” June said.
“It’s a pretty fun class,” Riley said.
When the students aren’t using the plants for cooking, tea or other projects, they harvest, bag and deliver them to Durango Natural Foods. The basil is sold for $25 a pound, and the lettuce for $7. The school cafeteria also buys some of the harvest, Boren said.
Around $350 worth of basil was sold to Durango Natural Foods in November, she said. All the money made from the sales goes right back into the class to fund new seeds, supplies and materials for the next batch of plants.
To donate
What the class makes from their herb sales is not enough to support the cost of maintaining equipment and purchasing necessary supplies like seeds, fertilizer and chemicals, agriculture teacher Lu Boren said.
Community members can support the class by donating at https://tinyurl.com/38c62f2d
Boren said she has watched students who had never grown a plant before develop a love of agriculture through the class and take that passion into agriculture internships and other life experiences outside the classroom.
“Probably two-thirds of the kids in my program are not agriculture kids – they’re not farm kids, they have no background in ag – and it’s fun to watch them explore,” she said. “I’ve had kids that didn’t know anything about agriculture when they started, and now they’re passionate about agriculture.”
epond@durangoherald.com
