READY TO ROCK

MAT-SU — Many alpine plants wear their own coats to survive the harsh Alaska winters.

That’s one bit of information a group of bundled-up Cottonwood Elementary School fourth-graders learned as part of a year-long project to create a rock garden. Spurred by a $500 Alaska Department of Agriculture grant, Laura Wick’s students spent part of Monday afternoon tending some hardy alpine species they planted earlier in the day.

“I’m showing them how closely packed the leaves are together,” the teacher said, passing around a woolly creeping thyme plant for the students to touch. “It’s really fuzzy. You can actually feel the fuzz on there. It’s low-growing, so it’s right by the ground and is protected from the wind and the cold.”

Travis Thornbue, 9, carefully chose the spot he planted his sedum, which he said is also an alpine species.

“That means it can grow up on the mountains,” he said. “The leaves are thick and good for keeping it warm on the mountains. The leaves are a little spiky.”

He planted the sedum in an area closely protected by outcroppings of rock. That will help snow be a good insulator during the winter, “and so the wind won’t blow it away out of its roots.”

The Cottonwood rock garden is one of a pair of Mat-Su Borough schools to receive funding from the Division of Agriculture. At Glacier View, a K-12 school, about 24 middle and high school students are using their $500 to build a greenhouse, said teacher Joel Moorman. The goal this school year is to have the greenhouse built and to run it as a fund-raising business in future years.

As a learning tool, students gain skills and hands-on experience in multiple aspects of starting and running a small business, he said.

“This year, the goal is to kind of give them an idea of what it’s like, first of all, operating a small business,” Moorman said. “The first thing we did was a market analysis survey to see what sort of desire there would be for plants in the area.”

Now students are researching design elements of building a greenhouse and will soon begin putting together a blueprint and budget of what they can actually build.

“The final goal in the end is to hopefully have a greenhouse that we can plant starts to sell as a fund-raiser for the school,” said Moorman, a science and math teacher at the school. He’s helping guide the project with colleagues Joki Talcott and Mark Owen.

Glacier View’s project probably won’t be ready to grow alpine or wetland plants to use in Cottonwood’s rock garden this year, but is hoped to be a continuing lesson in business, economics and agriculture, Moorman said.

“They have to look at it all, things like the amount of light that gets in and heat retention,” Moorman said. “We’ve also looked at irrigation systems, water systems.”

Back at Cottonwood, Wick started with lesson plans from the Agriculture in the Classroom program and tweaked them to fit the experimental rock garden. Students have been on field trips to local wetlands, Palmer Hay Flats and Alaska Plant Materials demonstration garden, Wick said.

By getting out of the classroom, students can have more hands-on involvement in their own education, Wick said.

“They remember it more because they’ve done it, they’ve invested their minds, their hands because it’s their garden, their project,” she said. “It also takes a combination of skills that reinforces the information in their brains. If students form questions on their own it’s more personal and has a better chance of being remembered.”

Students keep science journals and will record much scientific information over the course of the school year, the teacher said. They’ll measure snow cover, growth and soil temperature above and below the snow, for example.

“I’m hoping what they learn is that plants have different adaptations to survive their different environments,” she said.

Contact Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.