The Green Club began the year with new plants, repairing the pond and trimming the bushes in the courtyard garden near the Arts and Science Wing. Plants are sprouting throughout Room 2722, where Green Club meets weekly.
“We have all sorts of different plants right now,” Daasi Afanuh, ‘25, a member of Green Club, said. “During this season… February to March, we start clearing out the courtyard, preparing it.”
Green Club recently began building a greenhouse in the courtyard. This will be useful in the winter to plant sprouts and keep plants alive.
“Once we transition to… the beginning of spring, that’s when we start harvesting our berries,” Afanuh said. “We have some perennial strawberries, black raspberries and blueberries. Then over the summer, students come in and that’s when they start harvesting a lot of the plants we have.”
In the beginning of the calendar year, Green Club begins germinating their seeds. The plants, with few exceptions, are all edible and can be used for cooking. Along with these, the club grows other plants, such as luffa and marigolds.
“We grow a lot of tomatoes, which are really abundant,” Afanuh said. “We’ve recently started growing luffas, which are like natural sponges that you can use. So we were able to cut them up and take them home for everyone, which is really fun. We do grow a lot of different leafy greens. Those are mainly the hydroponics over the winter, but we do them over the summer as well.”
While the club primarily focuses on maintaining the garden, they also help with the pond. Inside the pond are fish, aquatic plants and their most recent addition, snails. The club intends to introduce new bacteria that will eat the algae over the summer. Excessive algal growth can be lethal to marine life.
“If the algae blooms too much, they’ll deprive the pond of oxygen and then the fish will suffocate,” Afanuh said. “Most of the other plants were put in either a year or two years ago. They’ve been doing really well and they’re completely growing on their own, so we don’t have to do anything.”
All of the produce farmed in the garden is donated to organizations around Cincinnati. Before the recent development of grocery stores in Walnut Hills, most of the garden’s food was donated to food pantries in the area. Although this has helped reduce food scarcity, Green Club does not plan to stop its efforts anytime soon.
“Most of the food that we donate is actually going to food banks,” Afanuh said. “Walnut Hills, until very recently, was a food desert, and so we really found it important to give back to the community that helped support us.”
Recently, more grocery stores have been opening, and Walnut Hills doesn’t need the support it once needed. The club expanded its donation range, now impacting communities as far away as Mount Washington.
(William Demeter)
“Anytime we have a surplus, which happens every year, the students take some home as well,” Afanuh said. “We only take what we need and anything else that’s left over is what we donate.”
At the beginning of March, the club had to spring into action in order to save the fish in the pond. A leak was found in the central pond of the garden, resulting in the fish not having enough oxygen in the water.
“We’ve had goldfish in there ever since the pond got cleaned out and they’re healthy except for when the pond breaks, like [it has] right now,” Afanuh said. “Some [of the fish are] from Ms. Riggs, but a lot of them have actually been from previous science teachers who originally just dumped them there.”
Many students who have a “green thumb” have found a place in the club. The club hosts meetings every week that are open to all.
“I joined Green Club first in ninth grade, and originally I had no interest in joining any clubs at Walnut,” Afanuh said. “Honestly, I think I had killed every single houseplant I had ever owned.”
Green Club focuses on much more than the garden. The club also has activities and events such as a pumpkin carving contest, which they host every year. Overall, the club strives to create bonds between WHHS students and the world around them.
“A lot of my friends were there, and I started getting really passionate about it, and I just realized how much agriculture affects so many things in our world and also how much of an impact I can make within my own community,” Afanuh said.