Vegetable Project

Please consider telling everyone who visits one of our gardens that you support our work to lead hundreds upon hundreds of Albany students in getting their hands dirty each year by sponsoring a garden bed for the 2026 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 of our research-backed efforts!

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

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 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 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

Want to lend a hand in the Vegetable Project’s gardens on your own schedule? Won’t you please consider helping to water at Albany High School and/or Myers Middle School from now until early October. Claim a week. Or maybe a day of the week for the summer. Or days that work for you. Either way, you’ll make a big difference in this volunteer group’s ability to head into the new school year with gardens teaming with teaching and learning opportunities.

Please reach out at thevegetableproject@gmail.com to arrange a garden walkaround and to learn the ropes with one of our veterans. Or go ahead sign up for days at Albany High here and at Myers here. We will get in touch and plan to meet you to get you started. We won’t leave you alone until you are ready. But please understand, the contribution only begins to make a difference as you start working independently and reliably.

Many thanks for 15 years of great support for our efforts.

–Bill Stoneman

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 21.

Please click here for a printable list of our offering brochure, invite a few friends to take a look with you and push those winter blues away with visions of warm spring breezes that are just around the corner. Then, prepare your order with this fillable spreadsheet, save the spreadsheet and get it to us.

You can get orders to us a few different ways. Email the order form to thevegetableproject@gmail.com and use the donate button at our website to make a payment. Mail the order form with a check payable to Vegetable Project to 10 North Pine Avenue, Albany 12203. Or drop the order off at the main office at either Albany High School or Stephen and Harriet Myers Middle School in an envelope marked Vegetable Project.

The Vegetable Project’s eighth annual Evening in the Garden is taking shape now. We have the date: Tuesday, May 6 (unless it rains and is rolled over to Wednesday, May 7). We have the location: New Scotland Elementary School, where a thousand tulip bulbs that we planted in October with the school’s 500 students should be blooming in the spring. We are talking with food establishments. We are lining up the music. We are reaching out to garden-related organizations about being a part of things.

And we would like you to know that becoming a member of the event’s honorary committee is a great way to invest in hands-on learning in Albany schools and a great way to stand up and be counted as a friend of our efforts to build teaching and learning around doing and touching and tasting and experiencing. We will include your name in an event program when you make a $25 contribution. And you can do that right now by visiting Eventbrite and clicking on the tickets button.