MISHAWAKA — On the last day of school Friday, students laid hands on the metal bones of a greenhouse, helping it to rise just north of the Battell Community Center. It may take a few weeks more to complete, but Christian Hawkins is eager for what will be “awesome.”
To see stuff grow in winter, to cultivate some “cool tropical plants” and to try composting for the first time, said Hawkins, who’s heading into his senior year. Not to forget nurturing beds of plants where, he said, “we can control the soil and pH,” referring to a term that measures acidity and alkalinity.
As garden club president at Mishawaka High School, he joined classmates from the school’s building trades program to fulfill a crowdsourcing dream.
Late last year, the club and the Mishawaka Parks Department joined up for an online campaign to raise $29,000 from the public for this 1,100-square-foot greenhouse, which the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority matched with a $23,000 grant, said parks landscape manager Jake Crawford.
It will replace the tiny, cramped space on the high school’s second floor with a glass ceiling where they ran out of room to, uh, grow the program, yielding plants to beautify the parks.
When it opens, perhaps by mid-summer, Crawford hopes to have classes for the public, anything from starting plants from seed to nutrition. The nonprofit Unity Gardens and master gardeners plan to help.
But the focus, he said, will be on the garden club.
Hawkins joined the club as a freshman, a year or two after the death of his grandpa, William “Bill” Howard, a local Vietnam War veteran who’d tended a garden at home with “huge” flowers and “super healthy” vegetables to relieve stress, including the leftovers of war.
“He always told me he wanted to become a gardener,” he said. “So I’m doing this in his honor.”
Hawkins finds that it’s therapeutic for him, too, after a day of tests and classes indoors, to stick his hands into the soil and feel the sunlight.
Fred Beron had seven out of his 12 building trades students out there Thursday and Friday. They were learning critical thinking skills, he said, since it’s a switch from the usual pace of house building. They normally build one house per year. Rather than wood, they laid their hands on metal frames, even cutting the beams, as they worked alongside Mayor Dave Wood and parks Superintendent Phil Blasko.
Bolting the metal frame together, student Deric Bailey said, “is like Legos — pieces go into pieces.”
Mavin Dietz said they were learning more tricks for how to work the metal parts.
Beron said they had to adapt and adjust the materials to a “generic” blueprint since the actual greenhouse will be a bit larger.
When Hawkins first told fellow students that he’d joined the garden club, they’d laugh. He expects the dozen regularly dedicated members to grow in the coming year. He and four other members are working summer jobs for Crawford in landscaping.
Now, he said, “I get kids coming up to me saying, ‘How do I join?’”