There’s a new club in town. Science teacher Jonathan Gray and world language teacher Vanessa Spallone join forces to form the Green Team, a middle-school gardening club.
The club meets every Friday during break and provides members with hands-on gardening experience. In addition to gardening, members watch and take photos of captivating wildlife on campus. The Green Team is different from the other clubs offered. It provides unique opportunities for students who are passionate about gardening or just looking to try something new.
“I think [gardening is] a stress reliever,” Spallone said. “I love to grow things and see them become beautiful. I also like to trim and cut and weed because it’s a great way to release all that stress.”
The club rotates crops seasonally. Fall crops include squash, pumpkins and several types of flowers. Many of the garden’s organic and pesticide-free herbs are donated to the Grille, while members take home the remaining fruits and herbs to share with their families. One club leader hopes to grow and sell poinsettias to other students during the holiday season.
The Green Team is enhanced by the expertise of science teacher Emily Massey-Burmeister and garden-savvy seniors Lilly Langdon and Ian Costello.
Massey-Burmeister introduced the two seniors to gardening last year. Massey-Burmeister, whose undergraduate concentration was in botany, taught her AP Environmental Science classes how to propagate plants.
“I’ve always wanted to teach a plant course so at the end of last year after my AP [Environmental Science] kids were done, we propagated plants,” Massey-Burmeister said. “We grew avocado seedlings and we propagated some other small plants and the kids really enjoyed it.”
Langdon and Costello enjoyed gardening so much that they decided to mentor middle-schoolers in The Green Team this year. Langdon encourages all middle-schoolers to try out gardening because of its unique offerings.
“It’s not a normal club,” Langdon said. “You don’t usually get to dig in the dirt and play with living things in other clubs. You can also eat the food that you grow.”
Massey-Burmeister loves how the club reflects students’ dedication and determination.
“I think a really cool thing about the garden is that everybody sees actual fruit come from all the hard work,” Massey-Burmeister said. “We’re actually growing things on campus in front of your very eyes.”
Spallone and Massey-Burmeister plan to utilize the garden to strengthen their academic courses.
“[The garden] is something that I could introduce to my students in French class and go out and teach the students new vocabulary about the fruits that grow there,” Spallone said. “This for me, as a language teacher, is an opportunity to get that experience in.”
“We have a lot of classes about animal science and it would be really nice if we had a plant science course,” Massey-Burmeister said. “I feel like a lot of people don’t really know where their food comes from, so it’s really interesting for students to propagate plants and see how a little seed can grow into a whole new avocado tree.”
Though The Green Team is offered exclusively to middle schoolers, club leaders have high hopes that it will grow in the coming years. Massey-Burmeister intends to extend the club into the upper-school so that Trinity students of all ages can learn about plants.
Not only do leaders hope to expand the club, they would like to expand the garden itself. Spallone aspires to build a strawberry patch, and Massey-Burmeister would love to build a greenhouse on campus.
“The gardening club brings [students] outside when they usually sit inside all day in air conditioning and artificial lighting,” Spallone said. “I think it’s nice to be outdoors and look at the birds and the wildlife we have around us. I think it’s very rewarding to plant something and see it coming out of the ground.”
