The Algonquin greenhouse has a hopeful future thanks to junior Mara Nelson’s Girl Scout Gold Award project, which aims to restore the space into an environment for growth and learning.
The greenhouse was built during Algonquin’s renovation about 20 years ago and is accessed through science teachers Christina Connolly and Christine Thompson’s classrooms. However, it never fully got up-and-running due to its temperature problems, and eventually, people stopped growing plants there.
Connolly, an Environmental Science and Biology teacher, has a door to the greenhouse and was there when it was first built.
“One of my hopes with a fellow colleague was to get the greenhouse up and running as an actual greenhouse…we had hoped we could grow [ plants] year round,” Connolly said.
Unfortunately, the greenhouse was built more like a sunroom, and with no way to control the temperature, it proved extremely difficult to keep the plants alive.
“We tried plants out there,” Connolly said. “But unfortunately, it would be one hot weekend that you didn’t know was going to be hot. You’d come back on Monday, and they’re all dead.”
Nelson, who has been a Girl Scout since kindergarten, is now working to get the greenhouse running again for her Girl Scout Gold Award. A requirement for receiving this award is planning and completing a community project that must continue to run when she leaves the school. She specifically chose the renovation of the greenhouse because of her passion for environmental science.
“I’ve always been interested in sciences, but I think Biology in my freshman year kind of sparked that,” Nelson said. “[That interest] even furthered when I did Environmental Science as a class here. It really brought out everything that I liked about science.”
The two main problems with renovating the greenhouse are fundraising and the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system. Nelson is currently fundraising for the HVAC system and hopes to get it done by the end of the school year. She hopes the greenhouse is eventually incorporated into the school curriculum.
“I’m planning to get it incorporated into AP [Biology] classes,” Nelson said. “Culinary classes will get food from it, and Urban Gardening classes, hopefully, can help out with maintaining it.”
Having Nelson in Environmental Science, science teacher Elisa Drake is overseeing this process.
“As Science Department Chair, I feel I’m in a position where I can help guide Mara, students and the school in general in figuring out what needs to happen in order to get it in operational standing,” Drake said.
Drake has begun to communicate with other schools that have greenhouses, like Norfolk County Agricultural High School and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as well as work with the administration to help.
“I’m sort of helping to bounce ideas off of both administration and work with Mara and other schools and greenhouse experts to sort of facilitate the rebirth of that,” Drake said.
Drake’s hope is not only that the greenhouse will be used for science classes, but that it can also be used as a space for students and teachers to do work.
“I hope that it will be a great place where people can hold meetings, where we can conduct experiments and just bring some fresh air into the space,” Drake said. “It’s like a living classroom, that’s really how I envision it.”
Both Drake and Nelson hope that the greenhouse will inspire people to grow their own food at home.
“Our hope is that we can take some of this education in a green space in the wintertime and have it transfer into the spring and summer months where people go into their gardens around their homes and around the community,” Drake said.
Drake and Nelson believe that not only will the greenhouse benefit the school community, but also the environment.
“[A goal is to] teach other people how to grow their own food because it’s way better for the environment if you grow your own food at home instead of having grocery stores ship it from wherever they grow it,” Nelson said.
The greenhouse will grow a variety of crops like winter crops (beets, carrots, radishes), lettuces, spinach, tomatoes, tropical plants and also will grow plants like algae with different experiments. The greenhouse may even grow milkweed to help endangered monarch butterflies.
“Right now our vision is a lot of herbs because we’re thinking that they could be used in the culinary arts classes throughout the school year,” Drake said.
Connolly is cautiously optimistic about the greenhouse and hopes that it can successfully grow plants once again.
“I love plants,” Connolly said. “I’ve been in functional [greenhouses], and they are awesome. It would be awesome.”
Nelson and Drake are unsure how long the process will take, but for now, the first steps are to raise the money to get it functioning again. Currently, Nelson has no fundraisers planned, but she is just ready to get a lot of people involved.
“I want to get as many people involved as possible,” Nelson said. “We’re going to include classes in [the greenhouse] and everything, so hopefully a lot of people will be included.”
