As we yearn for warm, sunny weather, it might feel like winter will never end.
But at Fernwood Montessori, on the city’s south side, spring’s been in the air for weeks. Students cut through the playground to get to the school’s greenhouse.
Today, while they’re doing chores, some of the students show WUWM’s Susan Bence what’s green and growing inside. View more photos here
Everyone at Fernwood gets to enjoy the greenhouse, a glass paned structure roughly the size of an MPS classroom. Sometimes students soak up a little warmth in the winter or pop in for an art project, but it’s the 7th and 8th graders who are the stewards.
Today they’re ticking through chores their teacher Matt Ray scribbled on the “to do” list.
“They truly feel this is their greenhouse," Ray says.
Ray says the idea is to introduce the students to the intricacies of an ecosystem, how living things coexist and share an environment. But Ray says kids learn best by experimenting. That’s how a-ha moments happen. Emma tells me about one of those moments. The 7th grader introduces me to two bullfrogs who the students figured out are going to be parents.
“The female I think is that one, the one that’s kind of smaller and she’s more greener. And then that’s the male and what we’ve noticed is that they’ve actually gotten closer to each other a little more. So we’re hoping we can have tadpoles and then if they survive, we might be feeding them to the perch,” Emma says.
The perch, 55 of them, are part of a system of tubs and tiers of edible plants that occupy the heart of the greenhouse. Twelve year old Sebastian says it’s the students’ job to keep fish and plants healthy and growing. He shows me the 50 gallon perch tank at one end of the system.
“Well basically when the fish uh well, poop, there’s these elements, nitrate and ammonia. They go through the system and then a watercress cleans them out,” Sebastian says.
After its watercress rinse, the water spills into tub number two. That was the site of another experiment. Sebastian says they stocked it with minnows and found out the little fellas like pushing their way into the stones that line the bottom of the tank.
“They burrowed their way in there and there’s a pump right there. And then they got sucked into the pump,” Sebastian says.
Today a couple of students are removing minnow remains.
There’s another operation at work along the periphery of the greenhouse.
Isaiah, who’s in 7th grade, twists off the cover of one of their compost barrels. The 11 year old says inside, there’s the prescribed balance of what he calls brown and green ingredients.
“Well a brown would be like those coffee husks which we get from a local company and a green would just be like lettuce, that’s green. Just stuff we would eat,” Isaiah says.
Sebastian chimes in.
“We put like vegetables in and they’re rotten and they smell funny. But then you can tell when the compost it ready, when they don’t smell anymore. They smell like nature,” Sebastian says.
Isaiah has disappeared, but returns with something in his hand. It’s a smallish worm. It’s one of about 10,000 red wigglers happily working away in their cozy worm bin. Well, cozy if you’re a worm.
“We feed them compost. And that actually makes the worm castings ten times more nutrient-rich so that our plants grow happy and strong,” Isaiah says.
In a few weeks tomato, bean and other vegetable plants will be sprouting out of planters that line the wall. The students built those too. Sebastian says they have more work to do.
“We think about the human footprint, like what we’re going to leave behind,” Sebastian says.
So they’ve done things like build a rain garden and installed supersized rain barrels to swallow up heavy storm water.
Teacher Matt Ray says the students have plenty of time to figure out how to take care of the environment. For now, he says, the greenhouse provides more than enough hand’s on learning.
“Well you just see their exuberance, the electricity coming out of these little 12, 13 year olds,” Ray says.
It’s clear they’ve got a nice little system humming along. Later today the greenhouse team will be sending composting starter kits, complete with worms, home with their fellow students.
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