Vegetable Project

The teacher who we hope we’ll be doing some work with said almost the moment she came into the conference room that she doubted we could take her students outside, given their poor behavior. She was clearly upset, seemingly because she was asked to meet with us. It wasn’t a good start to a conversation.

Whether we will get the chance to take this teacher’s students outside wasn’t resolved. And that was disappointing.

We make no claim to working miracles. We do not have a magic wand. However, our experience, and plenty of scholarly research shows that a change in setting can often help, sometimes by helping stressed individuals relax ever so slightly. And the students who getting outside can often help the most are the most disadvantaged kids, who also tend to be the ones posing the greatest challenges to their teachers and their schools.

So, our challenge is to explain this to the teacher we met last week without rubbing her the wrong way. We know how hard everyone works in the schools where we seek to contribute. We know how daunting the work is. We know how little so many friends in the community understand about how daunting the work is. And still, we also would encourage with all our might educators in every capacity to give the healing power of a quiet moment in the garden a try.

We have seen it make a difference before. It just might make a difference again.

–Bill Stoneman

Educators are tasked with daunting challenges, and especially in communities with significant numbers of disadvantaged students. This is presumably obvious to everyone who has spent more than a few hours in a classroom lately – professionals themselves, parent classroom volunteers, guest presenters, service providers and perhaps others.

And still, we would urge policy makers and professionals and people in the college and university teacher training programs with all our might to take note of incredible research speaking to the benefits of exposure to nature. Articles in scholarly journals are not so easy to wade through. Two summaries here, however, an infographic and a short article, Six Ways Nature Helps Children Learn, by one of the eminent scholars in the field,  are great places to start.

Move a bit of teaching and learning outside, which the Vegetable Project does with every opportunity it creates for itself, and the payoff just might be meeting those daunting challenges more successfully. Especially with the most disadvantaged students.

Why the greater chance of success? Well, evolution prepared the human species to thrive outdoors, not sitting at a desk in a classroom. And why especially the most disadvantaged students? Because one of those disadvantages likely is less access to nature. 

–Bill Stoneman

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 2025 growing season. With gardens at Albany High School and Stephen and Harriet Myers Middle School and a partnership with the Friendship Garden of the Delaware Community, we will mount a handsome sign, 4 inches by 12 inches, on the side of a raised garden bed at one garden in exchange for a contribution of $150 and will maintain the installation until March 1, 2026. Or please consider sponsoring beds at two gardens for $275 or at all three for $375.

Please use the form at the bottom of this flier to let us know that you would like to be a sponsor!

And please check out some of the kind and generous garden bed sponsors from previous years.

Funding supports creating hands-on learning opportunities for Albany kids, and especially kids with great needs, by building gardens, growing plants and harnessing the power of exposure to nature. It strengthens our work during the school day and after the last bell rings. It makes possible paid employment for high school students and helps us offer workplace preparation in partnership with Albany’s summer youth employment program. And still more importantly, it moves forward development of an outdoor classroom at Myers Middle School and builds sustainability of our work.

Together, these initiatives build equity, thus supporting one of the Albany school district’s most compelling goals, by boosting student contact with greenery, real breezes and soil. Indeed, extensive research links wellbeing, and academic achievement that depends on such wellbeing, to time spent in and around nature. And from backyards to summer camps to family road trips to beaches and mountains, time in and around nature surely is not distributed especially equitably.

We would be so grateful to shout out names of individuals, families, businesses and other organizations as garden bed sponsors. And we would be even more pleased if our friends shared the flier about this opportunity with their friends.

Please reach out at [email protected] with questions or to make arrangements. And many thanks for helping us through our first 15 years.

The Vegetable Project, a tax-exempt nonprofit organization, was created by and continues to be led by parents of Albany students.

–Bill Stoneman

The mission of the Vegetable Project is to create hands-on learning experiences for Albany children and especially children the great needs, by building gardens, growing plants and harnessing the power of exposure to nature. More than we even realized when we adopted this statement in 2015, the last clause – about harnessing the power of exposure to nature – may be the most important part of what we try to do.

Nine more years of experience, anecdotal as it is, and nine more years of reading what scholarly research and other thinkers find only strengthens our sense that exposure to nature, or even a school garden for what amounts to a 42-minute field trip now and then, can make a positive contribution to the wellbeing of children in a community. And wellbeing likely supports children’s development in important ways we seek to measure – building healthy relationships, making positive choices, achieving academically.

This isn’t to say people without significant exposure to nature are consigned to unhappy lives. And it isn’t to cast exposure to nature as a panacea for every ailment of the human spirit. It is to suggest, however, that schools, where kids spend six or seven hours for about 180 days each year, would probably help themselves by joining the quest to harness the power of nature. More than that, research suggests that schools would see the greatest impact with kids who typically pose the greatest challenge. Our experience and research suggest 42-minute field trips to an outdoor spot on school grounds is not going to take time away from teaching readin’ and writin’ and ‘rithmatic nearly as much as enhance those efforts.

The logic is simple: The human species is well suited to be outdoors. That’s where evolution created who we are today.

We have written occasionally over the years about this subject, often based on thoughtful published research, and share here links to some of those pieces:

From June 12, 2023, under the heading Digging in the dirt for academic performance.

A Feb. 9, 2023, reflection on the book The Well Gardened Mind.

Exposure to nature for sake of mental health from 2021.

Igniting curiosity among students not always seen from 2021.

Outdoor instruction important for mental health from 2021.

Taking nature seriously in education from 2019.

Surrounding pedagogy with nature to boost results from 2018.

–Bill Stoneman

We took a dozen students out to our garden at Myers Middle School on Wednesday to harvest collards, kale, Swiss chard, a few tomatoes, a couple of peppers, cucumbers, beans, some lettuce, basil, scallions and generally whatever could be found on this early October day. And the students returned quickly to their five family and consumer science (home economics) classes, where classmates and teacher Larry Drew set up for cleaning and preparing for cooking on Friday – and a bit of tasting at the same time.

This, we suspect, made learning feel especially meaningful for one class period of one day for most of about 90 students. This surely was experiential teaching and learning. We gave students close-up attention, which we know is valuable. And this is what we have in mind when we talk about harnessing the power of exposure to nature. Students appeared engaged both outdoors and back in the classroom.

Will reading and math scores rise next week as a result? Of course not. Can initiatives like Wednesday’s contribute to positive outcomes? Well, with research linking soaking up fresh air, real smells and the sight living plants to wellbeing piling up by the month, we think the answer is yes, over time, and probably especially so among students who have the fewest opportunities to relax in backyards, visit parks nearby or vacation at the seashore or in the mountains.

Did it take much to pull this off? Sort of: caring for a garden since the days warmed up last spring, building a team of both volunteers and very-part-time employees, cultivating relationships with community partners like Albany Medical College and the Honest Weight Food Coop, searching high and low for volunteers to help out with watering and bringing the same 90 students out the garden three weeks earlier to touch and taste everything we could offer.

And was it worth the effort? Or maybe rephrase, did we see a suitable return on investment? These are more difficult question to answer. The Vegetable Project can plant seeds in the thinking about meeting kids’ needs, but cannot alone cannot turn exposure to nature into broad-based, long-term, meaningful support for child and adolescent development. Maybe school districts can. Surely the prospects would be better if the state Education Department signaled some interest. Perhaps the thinkers in teacher preparatory programs could have some influence, if they thought we had a good idea here.

The day was certainly a wonderful one for all the adults involved. And as suggested a couple of paragraphs up from here, students appeared engaged, which feels like an important marker.

–Bill Stoneman

We missed the photographic opportunity of the season the other day. Hours before capturing the beauty of two dozen sunflowers at our Albany High School garden on Tuesday, Sept. 17, scores upon scores of bees were buzzing around the giant yellow flowers pictured here. They must have finished their meals. We did not see many again after that glorious moment.

So, here’s how we want to ensure that we maximize the value of the moment 12 months from now: We would like to invite Albany High living environment teachers and environmental science teachers and, well, every other teacher who thinks this sounds worthwhile, to bring classes out to see and experience what we see and experience. And while we don’t want to sound like salespeople in this world who promise more than they can possibly deliver, we are pretty sure that substantial numbers of students will be transfixed, entranced and captivated in a way that doesn’t happen inside classrooms. Teaching opportunities – about plant life cycles or pollination of adaptation or interdependence – will abound. And with that experience, some of the hardest-to-reach students will be eager to learn.

Teachers will get a glimpse at what we mean when we talk about harnessing the power of exposure to nature.

But here is the catch: We need to hear from teachers who are interested well before mid-September 2025. We need to head into spring with some sense of how many classes with how many students we might host. We need to think about actually intentionally planting seeds, rather than hoping that seeds dropped by this year’s plants will produce what we need. We want to think about how we can support teachers in making this an amazing moment. We need to think about resources we might want to organize and perhaps offer. We need to plan how we can all move quickly when we see the moment developing.

And how can teachers reach us? Well, the best bet is to stop and say hello when we are out in the garden by the North Main Avenue entrance to school grounds. But please also drop an email to [email protected] or text 518-728-6799.

–Bill Stoneman

And why? Well, to contribute to our programs that create hands-on learning opportunities for Albany kids. And also, for all the pleasures in the world that come from planting bulbs or making them gifts for friends.

The Vegetable Project builds teaching and learning around doing and touching and tasting and experiencing – all year long. In July and early August, it’s mainly in partnership with Albany’s Summer Youth Employment Program, an initiative that provides 14-to-18-year-olds with 100 Continue reading →

We launched a pilot project on Tuesday, June 12, to explore the feasibility of scaling up some composting efforts in schools where we work by collecting fruit and vegetable scraps from student lunches. And wouldn’t you know, the Biden administration announced a new strategy the very next day for keeping edible food out of landfills.

Did word of our initiative reach Washington on the day it was Continue reading →

–Bill Stoneman