Mountain Valley School

The Mountain Valley School’s greenhouse has two main goals: to provide fresh, nutritious produce to the school cafeteria and serve as living laboratory space for k-12 science classes. This grant will fund resilient vegetable beds built of cedar and rich soil to fill them. The expected lifetime of these boards is around a decade: cedar resists rot. This will serve our first goal by providing a robust growing space for our vegetables. Raised beds will enable us to bypass the dry, sand and clay soil of our home and see better yields, to be enhanced by planned vermicomposting and aquaculture projects that are funded by another grant.
This grant will build upon our second goal, of living laboratory space, in a number of ways. We chose a geodesic dome greenhouse so that the very structure would ignite inquiry in students. The form of the vegetable beds will serve as a further instructional tool in their design, materials, and function as a thermal mass in the greenhouse.