Sentinel students help lay new gardens at county fairgrounds (2024)

On a rainy Missoula Wednesday, about 20 Sentinel High School students carried boxes of plants around the county fairgrounds, meticulously placing each one in measured plots where they’ll grow.

Sentinel’s Advanced Placement environmental sciences class spent the last week getting 10,000 square feet of what used to be a parking lot ready for hundreds of new plants. The time in the garden fills in the weeks after the students wrap up their AP test, but before they graduate.

Last week, the students watched their hard work pay off as they measured and dug through dirt to lay seeds and plants. They’ll soon bloom into a myriad of produce at the Rocky Mountain Gardens, a new addition to the Missoula County Fairgrounds.

“I love that this used to be a parking lot, and that they completely tore it apart and made a beautiful garden,” senior Ava Meyer said. “There are so many effects of climate change it’s helping and preventing.”

Meyer’s team laid seeds for pea, cucumber and squash plants.

“AP Environmental is kind of a dark topic,” said Lindsay Manzo, AP environmental sciences teacher. “It’s so exciting, but it gets sad. It’s so much about what we do to the earth. It’s the science of human impact.”

Students having the opportunity to work on a garden project to offset some of the impacts of climate change is huge, Manzo said. Her class has done a number of field trips this year, but this is the first time they’ve been able to do service work in their community as an extension of the AP class.

The high school is just across the street from the county’s fairgrounds, and Manzo said her classroom’s close proximity made it an easy project to get students interested in.

Skills and topics learned during various units in class prepared students for their work on the fairground gardens, Manzo said, like water waste and pollution, which was applicable when students built the irrigation drip system.

“They’re applying so much of what they learned just by this one project,” she said, adding that her students have been enthusiastic throughout the whole process.

Gardens coordinator Molly Anton said the students smoothed out the terrain, picked out rocks and shaped the garden beds, and laid mulch on the paths.

Before Wednesday, students planned the garden with Anton by choosing beds and crops they wanted to plant. All of the garden's rows were designed by the class.

“They laid it all out,” Anton said. “I helped them barely at all. They did their own research.”

Senior Kaidan Houppert, part of the self-named “Mato Squad” (the team handling tomato plants), said his classmates have helped the progress being made on filling out the gardens.

“A lot of us have a basic background in gardening,” he said. “So coming out here is a better way to do it, and maybe in the future if we want to start our own garden, we’ve got the fundamentals for it.”

After the planting is finished, Manzo said the class plans to help plant a strip of pollinator-friendly flowers and vegetation to attracts bees to the sprouting produce.

The produce the garden yields will be given back to the community, either via community cooking classes or food bank donations, Anton said. Part of the plot students worked on will eventually become an orchard, and Anton said the food the Sentinel students planted will serve as an experiment for the county’s programming going forward.

“It’s pretty awesome we’re able to achieve this this quickly,” Anton said.