The Cuba Independent School system has received a $5,000 grant from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to purchase a “hoop house” for its horticultural program. It will add teaching space to the program offered to middle and high school students.
A hoop house is a plastic-covered greenhouse that does not have supplemental heating or cooling. Students in the horticulture program learn plant propagation, plant nutrition, floral arrangements, and greenhouse and nursery production. Initially, students grow seedlings in a controlled environment in the school’s 75 x 25-foot greenhouse built three years ago.
“We’ll be able to put a lot of our bedding plants in the unheated greenhouse hoop house and use it to harden the plants to cooler weather before transplanting into the field, or before we sell them,” Raymond Sisneros, who heads the school’s horticultural program, explained to the Signpost.
Vegetables grown in the class are sent to the cafeteria to feed students. “Today we took four 2×3 feet long plastic bags packed full of lettuce to the cafeteria. We’ll have another batch ready every 10 days. So, there will be a constant supply from here on,” Sisneros said.
When it’s time to start transplanting plants outside, if they want to garden at home for their families, students can take home two trays of plants. “I had them when they were in middle school and they grew their knowledge base all through high school. These kids will graduate being able to grow their own food,” Sisneros said.
“We also raise a large variety of houseplants in the greenhouse and we sell what they grow at the farmers market once a month in Cuba. People also come to the school to see what’s growing and if there’s something for sale, a lot of them will end up buying.”
The income that comes from growing and selling the plants is put back into the greenhouse program. It’s not quite self-sustaining yet, but Sisneros hopes at some point in the future it will be.
A former U.S. history teacher, Sisneros also taught horticulture at the Independent district and on the Navajo reservation. He has been gardening with his wife Susan for the past 50 years at Vallecitos Garden Greenhouse located three miles east of Cuba utilizing traditional growing and irrigation methods he learned from his grandfather.
Independent Superintendent Dr. Karen Sanchez-Griego has been 100% behind developing the program, as has the school board, Sisneros said. Some of the members of the school board are also his former students.
According to Sisneros, the Jemez Valley and Jemez Mountain schools have gone to NRCS and are working to “duplicate what we’re doing in the Independent district because they were blown away by it.”
Identifying different types of trees, bushes, shrubs and wild plants is also part of the horticulture class. “We go out and collect different kinds of grasses, seeds and plants that can be used or just identify them so the kids know what they’re looking at. We pick wild carrots and wild onions and taste them so they can see what they’re like. I also bring in other herbs that are not in the school district.”
“The focus of my whole class is on self-sufficiency. I’ve been working on it for over 15 years. I’m not quite there, but I’m getting there,” Sisneros said.