NORWAY — Twelve students from Spain finished building a greenhouse at the Alan Day Community Garden Friday, a weeklong project.

“They’ve done quite a community service for us here,” garden co-founder Katey Branch said Friday. “It’s very beautiful.”

The project was a way to learn local farming practices and get firsthand English experience. Later in the week, the students got help from teens from their host families, who helped speed up the work.

The Spanish students are in an English-language immersion program in Oviedo, Spain, and are touring the United States this month. This week they’ll travel to New York City and will be back next weekend for camping at Starlight Pastures in Paris.

The students worked in hot sun all week. On Friday, student Raquel Matute, 16, of Oviedo, said she was excited to be finished. She said there was a feeling of “Yes, we did it,” among the students.

Matute said she’s enjoyed staying and working in the Oxford Hills. Her host family owns a farm in Paris, and as an animal lover she was thrilled to be there. “There are goats and ducks,” she said, needing help from a fellow student with just one word. “Geese! There are geese,” she said.

“I love animals. They’re so cute,” she said. Oviedo is a city of about 225,000 in northern Spain, and Matute said she doesn’t see farm animals often.

Steve Day, who runs the English-language program with his wife, Clara Ruiz, is the cousin of Alan Day, the garden’s namesake. This is their first trip to the United States with the students, and he said he hopes there will be more.

“This is just kind of a test,” Day said, but said it has gone well.

The greenhouse is a “hoop house,” a row of semicircular metal bars with a sheet of clear plastic over the top. Instead of digging into the ground in the greenhouse, the students stacked layers of cardboard, leaves, straw, loam, manure, compost and soil, lasagna-style, to keep out weeds and give the greenhouse a good base for growth.

It’s the first greenhouse at the Alan Day Community Garden, 26 Whitman St. It will be used as an outdoor classroom for students at Guy E. Rowe Elementary School.

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