Students learn to grow at Cleveland greenhouse

By CARSON HUGHES carson.hughes@apgsomn.com

While local residents are preparing for another heavy snowfall this week, agriculture students at Cleveland Public Schools have been keeping their plants and seedlings safe from the winter frost inside the district’s new greenhouse.

The 24-by-48-foot greenhouse was opened up to students starting this fall semester, allowing kids to plant, grow, sell and cook their own herbs and vegetables directly on the Cleveland campus.

With the spring semester in full swing, a new batch of high school students in Cleveland’s Horticulture and Intro to Agriculture classes have been busy setting up the facility for a new season and planting seeds for a spring harvest.

Freshmen in the Intro to Agriculture class will soon be planting herbs like cilantro, oregano and parsley in hydroponic units which provide nutrition to greens through a water-based solution rather than soil. Once the herbs are fully grown, the spices will be distributed to cafeteria staff for use in school lunches.

Cleveland Agriculture instructor Kelly Susa noted the program gives students hands-on experience in managing plants from seed to harvest and finally the kitchen table.

“It’s a full-circle kind of system,” said Susa. “I know the Horticulture class, they did research on which varieties of flowers and vegetables and things to sell, they priced out seeds from different retailers and got those purchased. Now they’re planting them and making sure they don’t kill them between now and our plant sale.”

The greenhouse not only allows students to comfortably grow plants during cooler times of year, it also grants students the opportunity to ex- periment with different horticultural techniques. In Rebeca Herberg’s Horticulture class, students have been planting vegetables in soil based units while Intro to Ag works with hydroponics.

The greenhouse also features several vertical aeroponic units, also known as tower gardens, in which plants are suspended in air and cultivated with a liquid nutrient solution. Students are currently planting seeds in a soilless, mineral base called rockwool. Once the crops have sprouted into seedlings, they’re ready to be moved to the tower gardens for the rest of the growing period.

Last semester, the agriculture classes put these horticultural techniques to the test. The classes ran an experiment to track whether soil-grown plants or hydroponicallygrown plants would consume the most resources like water and nutrients.

“The students got really invested in that, finding out which is better and if hydroponics are the way of the future or for leafy greens,” said Susa. “Our results were inconclusive, we had to work out some kinks with our study, but being able to do comparisons like that and different projects was great.”

Susa aims to utilize the greenhouse for future student experiments.

The facility additionally serves as a resource for students in Cleveland’s Future Farmers of America’s program to grow crops, flowers and run trials and research.

The greenhouse’s debut this school year was made possible by an $87,000 grant from the Future Ready CTE program by the South Central Service Cooperative. Susa acquired the grant in 2021, which financed the costs of the greenhouse kit and construction. n