Strathmore High School student Beth Ostrowski won the Scotts Canada Young Gardener Award for her exceptional work with the Strathmore High School greenhouse project and other planting initiatives around the school like aquaponics, grow towers, and more.

Ostrowski said she's always had a love of agriculture and gardening from a young age, as her dad got her into it when he would find creative ways to garden with limited space. Since then she's taken every opportunity she could to stay involved in agriculture and gardening, which at the High School meant working with teacher Cole Hintz on all the various agricultural and green projects he was running. Among the already mentioned projects, she also traveled to Olds and Lakeland College for learning seminars and competitions.

Even as the school year is wrapping up Ostrowski has school agriculture projects on the mind, including one project that unfortunately couldn't get done this year but hopefully could begin next year.

"It was to create a floating raft with plants all over the top of it to go in Kinsmen Lake to try and clean up the water. I would have put native wildflowers, and they would suck up all the debris and all the nitrogen and all the other chemicals in there to make sure it's much more balanced of an ecosystem." 

While she doesn't know specifically what she wants to do in the future, she plans on going to either Olds or Lethbridge to continue studying agriculture.

"I would rather work with crops and technology, especially sustainable technology for crops because that's rather interesting and we will need it."

Regardless of what specifically she does Ostrowski looks forward to a future full of plants and gardening and is glad to have done so much in Strathmore.

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