Plants are both a scrumptious source of vegetables and colorful, eye-appetizing flowers, which is what the Gardening Club is all about. It is the perfect place to practice planting and consuming plants.
Hosted by advisors Ashley Freeman and Jingyi Zhou, the club meets every Friday. The club works at the greenhouse next to the Maker Space, located in the Holland basement of Malden High School.
The Gardening Club was founded in 2017 by engineering students with a goal to “look at Malden and our community and see what the needs of the citizens are,” Freeman stated. The engineering students are responsible for many of the constructions tied in with the club, such as “building the greenhouse…” The club’s crops are intended to be a source of food for both the students and the Malden community.
The club primarily grows a variety of vegetables, including “corn, carrots, beans, peas, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and eggplants.” They also tend to beautiful and fragrant flowers and herbs, including, “wildflowers and native flowers.”
Even though this seems like a spring-exclusive club, the class remains just as active during winter despite the frigid weather. In fact, it can be quite balmy inside the Maker Space. It is simply the result of plenty of heating around the room, so the proper heat temperature for the plants remains stable. All of this “extends our growing season.”
That is not to say that the club does not run into its fair share of tribulations. Plants have been victim to early decay and demise due to unpredictable factors. “We had some problems here in the hydroponics, with some root rot … because they all caught this disease,” said Freeman. Certain crops had to be cut due to continuous problems with them.
They have also struggled in supplying most students and the community, as “we bring the extra food that we have from the garden… but kids want to eat what they grow, so they take things before they’re ripe,” which wastes plants, and “we don’t want to lock up the garden.” Despite this, the club members have remained persistent in tending to these plants, as they’re “just trying to figure out the best way to deal with that.”
The club also has a bountiful amount of hydroponics. Hydroponics is “a way of growing crops in a more controlled manner than just growing plants in water,” providing plants with all the nutrients and care they would naturally get. This makes them a sustainable method for systems of plants inside greenhouses.
In retrospect, the Gardening Club is not only a prospering place for plants; it is a spectacular opportunity for students to collaborate. Freeman yearns to “have more kids continuing to come to do what we’re doing. I’m having fun, they’re having fun, they have a lot of plans for things they want to do for the garden.”
