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.
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