Growing plants reinforces personal growth at Wyoming Boys' School

In April of last year, the independent living coordinator at the Wyoming Boys' School Robin McIntosh took it upon himself to start cleaning out the facility's greenhouse, which through discontinued use had become more of a storage shed; after a year and a half, and through his efforts and those of science teacher Rebecca George it has become the center of a thriving garden program supported by all the schools' students and staff.

McIntosh said that some teachers at the Boys' School had approached him with the idea of getting plants in the greenhouse, and he ran with it. He saw it as a great opportunity to get students at the facility involved in agriculture. He got the greenhouse cleaned out last year, and got help from maintenance staff in getting the furnace, swamp cooler and the hydraulic temperature-controlled roof lift in the building in working order. He brought in the education coordinator of the Washakie County Conservation District, Janet Hofmann, who is a close friend of the Boys' School, to get her opinion on where to go with it.

She came up with long term goals of obtaining grants to fund large projects that would take place in the greenhouse, but to get the operation off the ground she donated extra plants from the Worland Community Garden, a garden that partners in part with the Conservation District and a frequent destination for Wyoming Boys' School students to volunteer and learn about plants.

George said, "We learn things out there that we can apply here and vice-versa. We learned so much from Ivy Asay who manages the community garden. We were able to take from their greenhouse some stuff that many of the boys had already become familiar working with, and we just started to grow them the way we saw out there."

McIntosh added, "It was a good starting point for the rest of the program to build on, because I brought in cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, oregano and some eggplants; that's what I got from the community garden last year. So I got that stuff going, and I started pushing that onto the dorms, and that's how I convinced them that they needed gardens, right? So, you know, they started supporting it, the directors started getting fresh cucumbers in their salads, and we just got everyone on board very quickly. It was a good selling point."

The greenhouse now hosts all the crops it started with, in addition to more varieties, more vegetables and herbs and some flowers; they're growing anything from cantaloupe to Carolina reaper peppers. The students are involved in every step from planting seeds, to maintenance and repotting, to harvesting, preparing and storing produce. All of the produce goes into the meals of students and staff at the Wyoming Boys' School.

There's lots of experimentation going on as well, to demonstrate that creativity is just as valuable as practicality in gardening. An example is a large crop of lettuce that was recently planted in a homemade garden tower made from a clothes hamper and a PVC pipe. George said, "We know that lettuce doesn't take up much space with its roots, and so we have as much lettuce in this laundry basket as we do on that table. And they can look and see just how much less room this takes up."

As was the intention from the beginning of the project, most of the work done in the greenhouse is performed by the students. George said, "It's important to know that there's a lot of work going on in here, and Robin and I are the staff most involved with it, but we only water the plants. Everything else is done with the boys, either here or hands on in class. We don't do much more unless they're actually in here with us, because this is their greenhouse, right? Their work, their products."

The greenhouse has seen its fair share of setbacks along the way - the furnace didn't kick on in the dead of winter, the swamp cooler died in a heat wave this summer, and some garden pests have taken up residence - but each time the people at the Boys' School were able to bounce back.

Repairs were made, crops that suffered were either treated or replanted, and marigolds were grown to act as a trap crop for aphids.

As a science teacher, George went ahead and made the most of the aphid problem by involving them in her class. She said, "In science, we're doing biology, and why not apply what we're actually doing in the greenhouse, hands-on with what we're doing in class; I came and got samples in here of aphid specimens. We put them underneath the microscope for the students to see their anatomy and to draw." George said that soon after the interview on Sept. 30, her students would begin a unit on plant biology and would be examining plant tissue, also sourced from the greenhouse.

As the greenhouse's use became a regular facet at the Boys' School, McIntosh said that there was a growing demand from the students to have their own gardens. The greenhouse is across campus from their dorms, and it can only be accessed at certain times with staff supervision; for some, that just wasn't enough. As a result, there are now garden boxes outside of two of the boys' dorm buildings, and the occupants of the respective dorms are the sole caretakers of their dorms' garden box.

"The students actually designed the boxes with the dorm staff, built the boxes, created the soil blends and do the maintenance. Everybody gets involved on campus. As far as working in the greenhouse and the gardens, it's a pretty holistic process, really. So the boxes are just made from lumber that they bought, but inside of the boxes, instead of using plastic, we used recycled carpet pulled out of the dorms, and that's how we've got weed barrier inside. And they make their own soil blend. And the students start the plants in the greenhouse with us, and then they plant the gardens and take care of them throughout the season," said McIntosh.

The Wyoming Boys' School's garden program has come a long way in a year and a half, and they hope to continue to expand it. They plan on introducing more outdoor garden boxes, continuing producing year-round in the greenhouse, and hope to one day have a garden tunnel. A goal of their program is to produce an excess of food that they can then donate to the community in Worland.

Both George and McIntosh said that they have seen much personal growth in the students who have applied themselves in the garden program. McIntosh said, "We're teaching them a lot of self-reliance skills, a lot of personal accountability in taking care of a garden. It's like we've talked about, you have to start it from the seeds and take care of the entire process. And if your garden dies, you have to take accountability for that and pick it back up and keep going with it, right? It's something you have to nurture and take care of. It's not instant gratification, it's a slow process and you keep going and you reap the benefits in the end."

He added, "Many of these boys aren't here to see the end product, and so they're invested into the work that will help somebody else. We try to point that out to them, that just because they're not going to be here when they harvest doesn't mean that somebody else won't be. And so they get to see and feel a part of something bigger than themselves; or even in their dorm, they're helping kids that aren't even here yet with the produce and the opportunity to garden and harvest and eat."