Nonprofit RootEd nurtures youths’ passion for fresh food.
Imagine sitting down to a sumptuous meal of brilliantly colored fresh vegetables in bright reds, greens, and purples, knowing every detail of how it got to your table. When Modular Greenhouses founder Josh Smith could finally say he’d grown everything on his plate, he realized how important those skills were.
Three years prior, the Washoe Valley native set out to design and build a greenhouse so he could garden at his Reno home. It would enable him to keep the plants warm between the high desert’s short growing seasons and keep the critters out. Realizing how empowering it was to grow his own food, Smith wanted to give younger generations that gift, too.
“When you realize that what you need to sustain life comes from the earth, you have a totally different perspective about the decisions you make,” Smith says. “I felt like it was a travesty that I wasn’t taught this most basic education.”
So he teamed up with friend Kim Arnott, and the two created RootEd, a nonprofit that brings greenhouses and garden programs to schools and other nonprofits. Through determination and a long process of reworking designs to meet school regulations, Smith secured Washoe County School District approval for his greenhouses to be installed in any Washoe County school that receives its principal’s approval. Today, his dream is to see a gardening program and greenhouse at every public school in the county.
Students celebrate at a ribbon-cutting ceremony marking the first Washoe County public school — Pine Middle School in Reno — to receive a greenhouse
Budding Love for Gardening
In order to fulfill this mission, RootEd seeks local businesses to sponsor the donation of a greenhouse to a school. Then it looks to teachers or community members to create a gardening program that will teach youths how to grow food. One major supporter has been the owners of Great Full Gardens restaurants in Reno-Sparks; Gino and Juli Scala donated $20,000 to partner in projects at High Desert Montessori Charter School and the Boys & Girls Club of Truckee Meadows.
Since beginning the project, RootEd has brought three greenhouses to Nevada public schools and three more to other facilities in the Reno area.
Smith hopes that children will begin growing food as early as possible in life, giving them a connection to a broader system.
“Kids [need] that feedback: ‘I plant the seed, I water it, nurture the plant, and it grows up and gives me what I need for my life.’ [This] is a critical and invaluable ecosystem that we should be part of and need to be educated on,” he says.
Once the projects are underway, Smith says the youths love any opportunity to be outside and play in the dirt.
In coming years, he hopes to see more business owners rise to the challenge of sponsoring a greenhouse for a school, similar to Great Full Gardens’ effort, which Smith says was “instrumental in modeling how a community partnership with local businesses could impact schools.”
Le‘a Gleason is a freelance writer from North Lake Tahoe, where she explores a curiosity for high-altitude growing in her backyard vegetable garden.
