Fountain Hills High School biology teacher Amanda Neaton has a passion for gardening, but she admits that it’s not one she expected to share with her teenage students.

Now that she’s got a Gardening Club up and running on the campus, however, she’s discovered that quite a few Falcons are interested in developing a green thumb.

This is Neaton’s second year at FHHS, moving to the area with her husband from Detroit. She said she comes from a family of gardeners, a hobby she brought with her to Fountain Hills.

Thanks to a chance encounter, she discovered that her students had an interest in gardening, too.

“I was hauling a load of straw in my car that I had been using on my gardening beds and one of the kids asked me about it,” Neaton said.

“I guess there was straw flying out my window when I was driving here and one of my TA’s asked me about it.”

When Neaton told her students what the straw was for, several said gardening would be something they’d like to get into as well.

“They’re like 17 years old, so I didn’t really expect that,” Neaton continued.

“So I asked all of my classes if anyone would be interested in a Gardening Club and I got about 20 kids initially.”

Neaton said gardening has always been a part of her life.

“It’s just something my family does,” she said.

“But Arizona gardening is perfect for a school because we have two growing seasons here and they’re both during the school year.”

Since things seemed to be lining up perfectly, Neaton decided to give the Gardening Club idea a go. Students have already constructed their above-ground beds with cinderblocks on the high school campus and are in the process of filling them with dirt.

Neaton said the first semester of the school year is perfectly timed for gardening, beginning at the start of the school year and ending when the temperatures drop; which is about right now.

Staring with the 2016-17 school year, the students will be ready to roll with gardening as soon as classes are back in session.

As for the second growing season, it begins when temperatures start to climb again in the spring, and ends in May when it starts to get hot.

“I want to teach about companion planting and teach the kids how to grow things for themselves, as well as help them understand how things interact in the soil,” she continued.

“A lot of people don’t know about plant toxins, plants that are good to companion with each other, plant pests and how to get rid of them…There’s this whole biodiversity episode that happens in a garden, so there’s a lot of ecology teaching I can do here as well as botany.”

Neaton said that she has found that, if students work on a project for a long period of time — like a garden — they really invest their interest in the project and commit to learning about it. That’s exactly the type of atmosphere she aims to create with the new Gardening Club.

“I was very surprised by how many kids wanted to try their hand at this,” she said.

“We’ve had a few kids drop off once they saw the amount of work that can go into gardening, but I’ve got a solid group of kids that seem really engaged.”

Neaton said that getting gardens prepared is part of the main focus for this first year of the club but, moving forward, they should be able to hit the ground running with the completed gardens.

“It’s important to learn about gardening because it’s becoming more difficult to get crops to grow, grow well, and produce food that is nutritive,” Neaton said.

“It’s also good for them to learn about when and where things can grow. We could get a lot more food out of the ground if we were gardening smarter.

“I also hope my students begin to understand the biological roles of all of the organisms that are contained in that small ecosystem of their garden.”