GLASGOW – Students at Barren County High School will work until May 12 to provide the community with a host of nursery plants available for purchase during the school day.

In a greenhouse behind the school, Andy Moore, an agriculture teacher and FFFA adviser, leads a greenhouse technology class, where students learn to run a nursery – from putting seeds in the soil to selling the plants those seeds grow into.

Although he oversees the class, Moore said the greenhouse is run by the students.

“We basically just run our school greenhouse, raise our flowers and have them so we can sell them to the community,” he said. “We want to run it like a business as much as we can.”

The class, which spans the entire school year, starts off in a traditional classroom, where Moore teaches students about what certain plants need. When the weather starts to get warm in spring, the students apply what they’ve learned in the greenhouse and another building set aside for seedling plants, he said.

“In the beginning, everybody rotates. We all do everything,” Moore said, adding that as the year progresses, students typically find an area they prefer focusing on, like dealing with customers or moving plants from one pot to another.

The greenhouse sells a wide range of plants, including more than a dozen types of flowers, such as pansies, petunias and begonias, herbs like chives and parsley, and eight types of peppers and 16 types of tomato plants, according to a flyer at the greenhouse.

Sales continue at the greenhouse until March 12.

Students get to experience the entire process of plant growth, Moore said. He added many of the plants, in order to squeeze the class into the school year, must be planted a week or two before their optimal planting time.

Alexis Gaw, a junior at the high school, said she took the class because she enjoys working with plants.

“I like hands-on activities and anything to do with agriculture,” she said.

Gaw has taken an agriculture class every year she’s been at BCHS. She plans to take another one next school year and is interested in pursuing agriculture education as a career.

“In all the classes, you learn how to make something, then you get to learn how to market it,” she said.

Since the current school year began, Gaw has learned how to seed and transplant plants and how to sell products. She said that over the course of the class, as many as 15 customers might stop by.

Andrew Gentry is a senior at the high school whose family owns Mammoth Cave Transplants, a series of greenhouses in Brownsville. He is thinking about working there after graduation, said the class has taught him a great deal about working with plants.

Despite having spent his summers helping out at Mammoth Cave Transplants once a week or more while growing up, Gentry said he was “general labor” and didn’t take care of the plants directly.

Gentry said what he’s learning in Moore’s class is preparing him for the work he’ll likely do in the near future.

“It helps me by having me learn more that I can take to our greenhouse,” he said.

– Many other high schools in the region have greenhouse programs where plants are sold to the public weekdays and some on Saturday. Check with the high school closest to you for information.