A dome of their own: UI Extension greenhouse helps Hailey students dig into gardening

Hailey Elementary School teacher Shawn Schumacher couldn’t contain her enthusiasm last spring after reading an email from University of Idaho Extension on her lunch break.

“They’re going to give us a greenhouse!” Schumacher shouted as she ran down the hall toward her colleague, Caroline Grist.

UI Extension educator Grant Loomis, Blaine County, is preparing to launch a program that will teach participants in the Wood River Valley how to build their own geodesic dome greenhouse from scratch. To test the design, he made a trial greenhouse during the summer and chose to donate it to Hailey Elementary, which plans to use it as a resource for teaching science, engineering and art, as well as for Schumacher’s informal student garden club.

The first dome was funded with a $3,000 UI Extension Innovative Projects grant, also benefiting from donated supplies from area businesses and labor from the county Extension team and school volunteers. Participants in Loomis’s future greenhouse-building classes will be asked to cover their own supplies and tools.

“I just feel like locally in Blaine County there’s a lot of interest in home production and self-resilience,” Loomis said. “I could see this class starting here and maybe becoming a statewide program through which we host classes in different counties.”

Inspiration for the project

Loomis got the idea for the program from a presentation University of Wyoming Extension educator Jeff Edwards made during a Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education conference hosted in Salt Lake City during the fall of 2024. Edwards provided Loomis with a geodesic dome greenhouse construction manual, including tools needed, specifications for machining parts, a website for buying specialized vents and precise quantities of plywood, lumber and polyplastic layer to order.

“It really resonated with my interests,” said Loomis, who made minor adjustments to the plans based on local availability of materials. “It turned out a lot bigger and better looking than I initially envisioned. It’s a real eye-catcher.”

The dome design has proven capable of withstanding harsh southeast Wyoming winters, as snow slides off the roof rather than accumulating. The vents are equipped with gas chambers that trigger louvers, or slats, to open when the ambient temperature reaches a certain threshold.

Loomis anticipates greenhouse-building classes will commence in 2027, with no more than 10 students per cohort. Instruction will likely be offered at a chosen participant’s property, where a single greenhouse will be built as an example for others in the class to follow.

Community showpiece

Rebekah Dahlin, an Extension administrative specialist who helped with greenhouse construction and coordinating plans with the elementary school, believes the dome outside of Hailey Elementary will serve as a showpiece to spur interest in future greenhouse construction classes.

“I’ve already had people reaching out to me like, ‘Hey, I saw what you guys did there,’” Dahlin said. “I think that’s part of Extension, too, is getting to work with constituents in your community and making something like that come to fruition.

School garden

Schumacher, who is the elementary school’s art teacher, created a 3,000-square-foot garden on school grounds in 2022. Many students interested in horticulture spend their recesses planting, raising and tending to a variety of flowers, herbs and produce, available for school staff and the public to pick.

“I think kids need to get dirty,” Schumacher said. “We’ve moved away from that, and gardening is a great way to get them dirty.”

Schumacher also routinely convenes art classes in the school garden, where students can draw or paint plants in detail.

Grist, who is the school’s engineering and design teacher, assigned her students to build wooden planter boxes to place inside the greenhouse. They’ll be filled with compost and drip irrigated.

“The greenhouse itself, along with the boxes, was a great opportunity for problem solving,” Grist said. “They had to do the math to figure out how big the boxes should be and how much materials we needed.”

The greenhouse should extend the gardening season by a couple of weeks both at the beginning and end of the season. The school also has plans to use the structure for outdoor classes when the weather turns cold.