WCHS student grown lettuce headed to The Wrigley

Thanks to their high tech hydroponic growing system in the greenhouse, the Whitley County High School agriculture department has been harvesting 72 plants of lettuce each week since mid-January.

Now they have a market for that produce in the form of a downtown Corbin restaurant.

The Whitley County School District recently announced that The Wrigley Taproom & Eatery will now be serving this locally grown produce.

“This is our first official order from a small, local business! A huge shoutout to Driver’s Education Teacher John Reeder and his students for making this delivery possible! Be sure to check out The Wrigley in downtown Corbin to try our lettuce!” the school district wrote in a recent Facebook post.

“With a hydroponics system, you can grow 30 times more produce than you can on that same plot of land outside. We can grow year round, and it is faster and more efficient,” Brian Prewitt, who teaches the agriculture, horticulture and greenhouse classes at WCHS, said in January when the first lettuce crop was harvested.

The school started putting the hydroponic system together in the fall, and planted the first crop of lettuce around Thanksgiving.

The lettuce plants start as seeds in the nursery for four weeks before being put in the hydroponics rows to grow for another four weeks.

It takes the lettuce plants a total of eight weeks to grow using the hydroponic system compared to about 12 weeks growing outside in the dirt.

Prewitt said the school’s home economics teacher noted that there is about 19 percent waste growing the lettuce in the ground from the time you harvest it until the time you get it on the plate compared to about 2 percent loss via hydroponics.

“Through hydroponics you don’t have any ground contamination and those kind of things,” he added.