Willmar Greenhouse Project

The greenhouse has gotten much bigger in the two years that it has been around. The plan for this year is to start getting even more people involved. The original team that started the greenhouse is no longer here, therefore, we would like to find more volunteers that can lead the project.It was student lead when it started, we want it to be student lead when it is finished. The greenhouse has two wings to it. When we first started working in it, we only used the west wing for growing indoors. It was our trial crop to see what we needed to do to make the east wing better. This year we would like to completely renovate the east wing. The project is already underway with another volunteer doing most of the carpentry. He is replacing plant beds and building a shelving unit that will allow us to collect as much light as possible but at the same time grow the most amount of produce indoors. This year we were also given a hydroponic system so we would like to get that put together and start an experiment with those units as well.We would like to involve the local nursing homes and care centers as a recreational activity to help out at the greenhouse. Also, we would like to get more youth involved in the elementary and middle school. They could have field trips up to the greenhouse and maybe take some produce home, or learn how the scientific processes that are going on in the greenhouse relate to what they are studying in class, as well as help those who are in 4H. The whole goal of the greenhouse is to be as self sufficient as possible. We have solar panels set up to heat the greenhouse in the winter as well as a biomass burner that was also donated to us, as a back-up system. The next step is to see if we can collect our own rain water/snow for watering the plants as well as heating the building. When we first started working in the greenhouse, we only had an electric heater that heated the east wing. We used water jugs filled with water to collect the heat that was given off by the sun to keep heat in the building at night. We found that to be a very efficient way of heating the greenhouse until we got the solar panels. The plan is to still use the water to heat the west wing until we can get the solar panel system hooked up to that side. The plan for the greenhouse this year, as of right now, is to also try and grow food that is not normally grown in Minnesota; Our community is made up of several ethnicities including hispanic, and somali. We would like to see if it is possible to grow foods from their countries in one wing of the greenhouse. This would in-turn, perhaps get more of the community interested in volunteering.