Vegetable Project

Here’s how you can show your support for the Vegetable Project by sponsoring a bed in one of our gardens for the 2027 growing season.

Please consider telling everyone who visits one of our gardens that you support our work encouraging hundreds upon hundreds of Albany students to get their hands dirty each year. With gardens at Albany High School and Stephen and Harriet Myers Middle School and a partnership with the Friendship Garden of the Delaware Community School, 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. The installation stays in place until the next growing season in 2028. 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 of our research-backed efforts!

And check out some of the kind and generous garden bed sponsors from the 2026 growing season.

As you likely already know, 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 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.

Please reach out at thevegetableproject@gmail.com with questions or to make arrangements. And many thanks for helping us through our first 16 years.

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

–Bill Stoneman

Capital Region educators, education leaders and other interested community members: You are invited to the inaugural Teaching in the Garden Workshop at Siena University on Monday, Aug. 24!

Learn about nuts and bolts issues such as garden maintenance and community/family engagement, emerging trends like farm to table programming and pulling it all together with outdoor and place-based education curriculum.

Please sign up here: https://docs.google.com/…/1FAIpQLSdGDraTisVL5z…/viewform or drop email to jsuriano@siena.edu. And please do it soon, as space is limited for this first time around.

Whether you thinking about launching a garden program or furthering work you have already started, this workshop is for you! Come interested; come curious.

The workshop, a collaboration of Siena, the Schenectady City School District’s Farm to School Project and the Vegetable Project, will be on the Siena campus in Loudonville from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. with breakfast and lunch provided. Six continuing teaching and leadership education credits will be offered to interested attendees.

Tentative Agenda:

8:30 – Arrival and breakfast

9:00 – Guest Speaker

10:00 -12:15 – Model Lessons & Debrief/Planning

12:30 – 1:30 – Lunch

1:30 -2:15 – Panel Presentation

2:30-3:00 – Roundtable Discussions

3:00-3:30 – Wrap Up

We hope to see you there! Jenni Suriano, Siena University; Rebekka Henriksen, Farm to School; Schenectady CSD; Bill Stoneman, Vegetable Project

And if you are unable to attend this year’s event, but are interested in a similar one in the future, please complete the Google Form. This workshop is a pilot step toward a larger conference that we hope to host in the very near future.

The Vegetable Project’s ninth annual Evening in the Garden will be at Albany School of Humanities this year, on Tuesday, May 5 (rain date the following day, Wednesday, May 6). We sure are looking forward to showing you what is growing, sharing with you about our work to create hands-on learning opportunities, offering a few hands-on learning opportunities right there and introducing you to knowledgeable growers who are eager to share their expertise. Continue reading →

Looking for a way to contribute to the Vegetable Project? Want to make sure in the fall you have some early color in the spring? Thinking about a good reason to stay outside digging in the dirt until there’s a chill in the air? You can do it all by buying flower bulbs from the Vegetable Project now and planting them in the fall (which actually is coming sooner than you might think).

Won’t you please take a look at our offering, which we present in partnership with the wonderful Flower Power Fundraising company of Wisconsin through Monday, Oct. 13. Please click here to find everything you need.

Want to know more about the contribution you make by supporting the Vegetable Project? About the joy of working in the yard until the days are cold? About the early spring color?

The Vegetable Project has been getting Albany kids outside and getting their hands dirty since 2009. We build programming around the kids who are not thriving in the sit-still-in-your-chair world of mainstream teaching and learning. We teach a bit about plants and biology and ecology and science. But most of all, we give kids one-to-one attention. We build relationships. And we meet them where they are.

Now, about the joy of working in the yard until the days are cold: We cannot prove scientifically that it will work for you. Experience shows, however, that it works for most people – including the students who we will make sure get outside in November and December and January and February.

And that early spring color? Well, bulbs provide it sooner than anything else in your garden.

The Vegetable Project receives half of all proceeds raised by our sale of bulbs. And that means that you contribute to our  work at teaching kids where their food comes from. It means that you support outdoor instruction. It means that you help us make a difference with kids who benefit from doing and touching and tasting and experiencing. And so much more.

–Bill Stoneman

The Vegetable Project seeks a teaching candidate to join its team for five to 15 hours a week year-round in Albany schools.

With a mission of creating hands on learning opportunities for Albany children, and especially children with great needs, by building gardens, growing plants and harnessing the power of exposure to nature, we build teaching and learning around doing and touching and tasting and experiencing. We do this in classrooms, after school and over the summer in partnership with a city program that offers work experience to teens.

The position will offer learning experiences that would be especially meaningful for an undergraduate student pursuing a career in teaching or other human services.

Please get in touch at thevegetableproject@gmail.com

Please learn more about the position here.

Our Evening in the Garden is moving to Wednesday, May 7, from tomorrow, May 6. And we hope you can still make it! 

Please celebrate getting kids outside and getting their hands dirty with us at New Scotland Elementary School from 5:30 to 7 p.m. The weather forecast looks more encouraging on Wednesday than it does on Tuesday. We are rounding up pop-up tents. We’ll have you covered.

Please come for the music, the great food, the friends you’ll make or run into. And most of all to say you support building teaching and learning around doing and touching and tasting and experiencing.

–Bill Stoneman

Coming soon to six classrooms near you! Tentatively on Tuesday. Live squiggly decomposing machines. Because we want student engagement when we talk about breaking down organic material. And recycling of nutrient. And nourishing our garden soil. And what the big deal is about the plants that depend on nutrient in that soil (you know, like giving us every bite we’ll eat, directly or indirectly, from birth to death, and producing the oxygen we need to breath — through that amazing chemical reaction known as photosynthesis — and simultaneously converting the sun’s energy into a form that powers Continue reading →