Elementary school students from Clifton, Holden and Eddington will get to learn in a new greenhouse at the Holden Elementary School this year.
The greenhouse, which is 19-by-24-feet and more than a story tall at its peak, is the culmination of three years of fundraising by the garden club, an after-school program. Fundraising and grants raised the $22,000 needed for the project, club founders Kelly Davis, a pre-K teacher in Eddington, and Inez Laverdiere, an ed tech at the Holbrook School in Holden, said.
Although plants can’t be grown in the greenhouse year round because it isn’t heated, the space will be used by teachers and the program as an outdoor classroom.
“We’re hoping everybody can take advantage of it,” Davis said.
While the greenhouse is a new addition, the success of the garden club in the roughly four years since its founding shows that young students enjoy interacting with and learning about nature in a time that social media and electronics have become engrained in children’s lives.
Started after COVID-19, the club is made up of 20 third and fourth graders. The limited number of students allowed in the group has created a waitlist for its three eight-week sections that teach students about planting, harvesting and crafting.
Support and excitement for the group expands outside the Holden Elementary School. Community involvement, through fundraising at events throughout the year and volunteering supplies and labor, made the project possible, Davis said.
“It’s nice because the community’s been really supportive. We had somebody come in to do the groundwork and didn’t charge us or anything, and then the wood came from Viking, and they didn’t charge us,” Davis said.
The greenhouse will be used as a gathering place for the group when meetings start on Sept. 22. Fundraising events will continue this fall, with funds going toward flooring for the building, Davis and Laverdiere said. Tables and shelves will be moved into the greenhouse as early as this winter to be used for growing plants.
The space, which has a solar panel to power an automatic system that opens and closes the roof and other panels if the inside gets too hot or cold, is a large upgrade from where plants were being grown before. Before anything could get moved to the raised beds next to the greenhouse, plants were scattered around the elementary school, Laverdiere said.
“This lets us have our own space too, because we were just borrowing classrooms and gym space to do our thing in the winter,” Laverdiere said.