Category Archives: Teaching

–Bill Stoneman

Myers Middle School students scooped seeds from freshly plucked tomatoes last fall as we began another year of our afterschool Garden Club at the school. We followed instructions to ferment the seeds, dry them and then store them. Then, months later, a certain Vegetable Project volunteer dropped a handful of those seeds in a small container of potting mix and sat tight for nine days. Then, voila! Twenty or so tiny tomato plants pictured here.

It is so easy to germinate tomato seeds that this is almost cheating. But we have here the faint Continue reading →

“We believe that nature makes kids healthier, happier and smarter.”

The words appear on page after page at the website of the Children & Nature Network, a national advocate for getting children out into nature. And though that does capture the essence of the organization’s driving purpose,the organization Continue reading →

If you enter our shed at our Albany High School garden and look up and to the left, you’ll see a few remarks that the structure’s student builders left for the eventual users. Though the shed was essentially completed in June 2022, we’re just moving in now, 20 months later, and thus just noticing what the proud students wanted us to know.

And what a pleasure it is to see one saying that Art Erbe, who leads Albany High School’s construction technology program, “is the best teacher” and thanking him for being the writer’s teacher for three years. We would certainly add Continue reading →

Make this the year that you start your own garden, maybe fill a couple of planters on the front porch, or perhaps add a few square feet to that special space – for the beauty you’ll create, for the hope you’ll inspire and for the stewardship of the environment that we share. And please support the Vegetable Project when you do by buying High Mowing Organic Seeds from us from now until Friday, March 29.

Please click here for a printable list of our offering brochure and order form, or here for faster loading, invite a few friends to take a look with you and push those winter blues away with visions of warm spring Continue reading →

One of the great challenges of school gardening in upstate New York is the mismatch between the school calendar and common notions of when the growing season starts and ends. Students aren’t in classes in July when tomato vines look bigger from one day to the next. And January temperatures are not exactly conducive to dividing up perennials.

We at the Vegetable Project, however, are making headway in our bid to redefine the growing season, so that it synchs up with the school calendar a bit better than some would think possible. You might actually say that we’re working to turn the period that begins January and runs through December into growing season, though we don’t expect to be doing quite everything that the word “gardening” implies when the daylight is short and the temperatures fall below freezing.

One initiative involves learning to build and learning to use “season-extending” fixtures, like small hoop Continue reading →

Want to learn how to turn a plastic gallon milk jug into a miniature greenhouse? Would you consider volunteering with the Vegetable Project team as we bring a burst of heart-pounding activity  – widely known as winter sowing – to more than 20 Albany schools classes between late January and early March?

Please join us at one of the following three hour-long training sessions, strictly for your own enjoyment or to prepare to participate in our third annual tour of the school district, bringing more intensive Continue reading →

The Vegetable Project, which leads hundreds upon hundreds of Albany students in getting their hands dirty each year, invites its friends to show their support for the organization’s research-based efforts by sponsoring a garden bed for the 2024 growing season. With gardens at Albany High School and Stephen and Harriet Myers Middle School and a partnership with the Continue reading →

The New York State Food Donation and Food Scraps Recycling Law, adopted in 2019, requires businesses and institutions that generate an annual average of two tons of wasted food per week to donate excess edible food and recycling all remaining food scraps if they are within 25 miles of an organics recycler, such as a composting facility or anaerobic digester. But interestingly, while the law absolutely covers colleges, school systems serving kindergarteners through 12^th graders are specifically exempt from the requirements.

Maybe the state Legislature, in its infinite wisdom, recognized that K-12 schools are already Continue reading →

We organized what we called an Invasive Species Workshop this summer at Myers Middle School with a general awareness that plants and animals from different parts of the world can really disturb stable ecosystems when they’re introduced to places where they don’t belong. And we organized the two-day activity with the conviction that teaching opportunities drawn from our Continue reading →