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Green thumbs up for gardening
Thomas Simpson students get hands-on lesson in growing vegetables

April Hudson
Northern News Services
Thursday, June 18, 2015

LIIDLII KUE/FORT SIMPSON
Micro-greens piled high on salads last Friday as seven Grade 11 students at Thomas Simpson School munched on home-grown vegetables and shared the fruits of their labour with the school.

NNSL photo/graphic

Thomas Simpson School experiential science teacher Nathalie Lavoie introduced her students to the wonders of gardening this year. Here, she holds one of her students' hand-made hydroponic systems, already being put to good use growing vegetables. - April Hudson/NNSL photo

Part of an experiential science class, the students spent time recently working through a unit on plants, which had them building their own containers and growing an assortment of healthy vegetables.

Aside from growing plants, students put together hydroponic systems from recyclable materials such as newspaper and old coffee cans. Hydroponic systems allow plants to be grown without soil; instead, the plants thrive on nutrients and water.

"This was a really great way of giving students some hands-on experience. It's one thing to look at microorganisms in a textbook; it's quite another to look at them in reality," said teacher Nathalie Lavoie.

"Micro-greens are a fun thing to observe because they only take seven days to grow, and they contain 50 times the nutrients of full-grown (broccoli)."

Student Melanie Betsaka has her own garden at home, but growing micro-greens with her classmates was still a learning experience.

Aside from micro-greens, Betsaka tried her hand at broccoli, chives, lettuce and basil.

"They all grew pretty well, but my lettuce was weak because it lacked support. So I ate it," she said.

She explained that if a plant expends too much energy reaching for the sun, that results in a deficiency in growth - which was likely what happened in the case of her lettuce.

"Plants need a good balance to survive," Betsaka said.

One of Betsaka's favourite plants to grow was the chives, due to their perennial nature. Additionally, she said chives help to keep pests at bay, such as slugs and other harmful bugs.

But growing the plants was only one step. Learning about the environmental cycle of gardening was just as interesting.

"Everything gets recycled. The remnants of our plants go to worms, which eat the decomposed vegetation. The dirt they're in becomes new fertilizer," Betsaka said.

Lavoie followed up her plant unit with a section on sustainable energy, taking the concept of the environmental cycle even further.

Students learned about alternative energy sources and some of the technologies that have been developed to replace fossil fuels.

"Being environmentally conscious is one step," she said. "I think another (step) that's equally important is to assess one's lifestyle and make changes."

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