NHS Greenery Offers Different Learning Experience

By Laurie Borst

The Newtown High School Greenery was buzzing with activity the morning of May 25. The greenhouse was open for the end of season sale. Beautiful, healthy plants hung from overhead pipes and filled tables. High school teachers, students, and staff visited to shop for flowers and vegetables.

George Bachman, Greenery teacher, was busy directing students and answering customers’ questions. The sale was the culmination of a yearlong study in entrepreneurship and botany.

Students learned to grow plants from seeds and cuttings, cloning in scientific terminology. Anyone who has stuck a piece of a plant in water and generated roots has performed cloning. Cloning is the production of plants via asexual reproduction, resulting in offspring genetically identical to the parent. Some plants are purchased all ready potted and nurtured into larger plants for sale.

Tuberous begonias are one plant that students grow from tubers. Tubers are fleshy, rounded parts of underground stems, like a potato. New plants grow from buds or “eyes” on the tuber. Begonias do not ship well so large greenhouses do not grow them. Small enterprises like the Greenery can propagate and sell them locally.

It was surprising to learn that some plants are patented. They come with the warning “propagation prohibited.” Large greenhouses that invest large sums of money in development of new strains of plants have had to resort to protecting that investment. Less scrupulous houses were making huge profits from using cuttings of popular plants and pocketing the money.

The entrepreneurial experience of the Greenery includes studying mathematics and economics. Students learn how to figure gross and net income from sales, costs of growing plants, inventory, etc.

The greenhouse, located behind the high school by the tennis courts, is open to the public Monday through Saturday from 9 am to 1 pm.