(This article was written by the 7th hour horticulture class at Centre High School.)

At Centre High School, agriculture classes are the favorite classes to be enrolled in. Laura Klenda and Cherie Trieb are the teachers who help students learn agriculture fundamentals. We take agriculture very seriously, especially our horticulture class. We tend the garden, fruit trees, and plants in the greenhouse.

The school recently was awarded a Farm to School grant. With that grant, the school must fulfill certain requirements, including having students plant and care for vegetables that we serve in our school lunch program.

For example, we filled raised beds with soil from our other garden area, planted radishes, lettuce, and spinach in them, and then served them in our school cafeteria.

Last summer, we planted 14 kinds of fruit trees in a small orchard. When the trees get big enough to produce fruit, it, too, will be used for school lunches. We keep busy watering them to make sure they have enough moisture to develop.

We will expand into an aquaponic system (a combination of raising fish in tanks and cultivating plants in water fertilized by fish excretions) to produce vegetables and fish in the future. We are doing research on it.

This year our focus has been on tree identification, learning about the various shapes of tree leaves, from simple to compound or bi-pinnately compound. We can now identify more than 20 types of trees. Most of us did not even know how to identify a maple or an oak before we started. Now we know six different oak trees.

Recently, we have been learning how to identify properties through interpreting and writing proper legal land descriptions. We can also calculate the number of acres in various parts of a section of land.

Soon we will be covering floriculture (flowers) and entomology (insects). We will plant seeds for our spring plant sale next semester.