Growing confidence: Middle school continues hydroponic garden program

Students at Homewood Middle School once again have the opportunity to enhance their green thumbs without having to dig dirt out from under their fingernails.

The school’s hydroponic garden project, spearheaded by HMS teachers Georgia Miller and Mary Binkley, was made possible through a 2015 Homewood City Schools Foundation grant, and the two are continuing the garden this school year.

“Wellness and gardening is part of our curriculum,” Miller said, and hydroponic plant cultivation fits in naturally.

Miller said hydroponic gardening is the cutting edge of the gardening world, and is perfect for small spaces and desert climates.

This is particularly helpful for many HMS students with living situations that would ordinarily prohibit cultivating plant life.

“We have a huge apartment community,” Miller said. “It’s going to give gardens to a group that wouldn’t normally have access.”

Last year, Miller and Binkley started their first hydroponic garden with a manual they found online, scavenging and recycling items from the school to get together the necessary parts for the setup.

“We had to get creative,” Miller said.

Hydro Ponics, a hydroponic supply store in Pelham, also helped the project along and offered advice on how to set up the racks of plants.

The classes used a combination of old dress racks the school had on hand, plastic water bottles they modified to fit their needs and plastic tubing to pump water through the system.

The plants hang in plastic bottles while nutrient-rich water flows through the cups and around the roots, allowing the plants to grow completely free of any soil.

Binkley’s enrichment-program students engineered the project, while Miller’s English as a Second Language students assisted.

“It was a fun collaboration,” Miller said.

This year, Miller said the hydroponic garden project fits in even better, as the science curriculum has been changed for sixth-grade students to be purely STEM focused and hands-on.

Students study the Earth and natural resources in the sixth grade, biology in seventh and physics in eighth, so Miller said the project fits with the school’s entire science program.

Where last year’s goal was learning how to work through the hydroponic-growing process, Miller said this year will include more experimentation, such as whether plants grow differently if they are started from seeds or as existing plants, and if the different rooms the plants live in makes a difference.

In addition to teaching students lessons in growing plants, Miller said the program shows students science is important in many ways, which is especially helpful for students who hail from cultures that don’t emphasize the sciences as much.

“For my students, it motivates them,” she said. “Many of them come from countries where science isn’t introduced to the middle school. It’s very different.”

She said the hands-on project is also good for helping students with language barriers use their skills and motivating them to interact with their classmates.

“It helps bring the different groups of the school together,” she said. “We’re a very diverse school where we try to find projects where all students are participating.”

As for the students — the project has been well received.

Miller said she thinks it has spurred an interest because it encompasses sciences such as engineering and biology as well as cultural aspects and learning about other countries.

“They are so eager,” Miller said. “The students have enjoyed this project more than any. They ask to work on it.”