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 [email protected] 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, which brings hands-on learning opportunities to more than 1,000 Albany students each year, receives half of all sales in this, our 14th almost annual seed sale fundraiser. You will have your seeds in time for the coming season’s planting. And you will be supporting our work to create even more doing and touching and tasting and experiencing in Albany schools, by providing us with funds for supplies, tools and equipment.
And rather donate the full cost of seeds or more? That’s okay, too. Just click on the Donate button at our web site to start your transaction.
High Mowing’s seeds are organic and free of genetically modified organisms, which we value. And based in Vermont, many of its seeds were raised in the Northeast, meaning they’re especially suited to thrive in our part of the world.
The Vegetable Project reaches out especially to kids with the greatest needs. These are kids in Albany schools who in many cases are challenging and disruptive, who do not respond well to being told “sit still in your chair” and “look up at the board.” We garden. We prepare tasty dishes with what we grow. And we teach about scientific method. But most of all, we engage kids. With full-fledged gardens at two Albany schools and programming at others, we connect with students in multiple ways: We lead a year-round after-school and summer evening Garden Club at Myers Middle School. We bring intensely hands-on activity, like turning plastic gallon milk jugs into miniature greenhouses to a half dozen schools each winter. We host a work site for a city summer jobs program that gives high school-age students a first exposure to employment.
In addition, we are building development plans for an outdoor classroom at our middle school home, with a greenhouse, a shaded sitting area, a fruit tree orchard and naturalized space where science classes would conduct meaningful scientific investigations. The completed space should be as irresistible to art or history teachers as it is to science teachers, thus increasing kids’ time outdoors in fresh air and amid greenery, which research indicates supports wide ranging healthy outcomes.
Happy gardening. And please help us spread word about this great offer.
–Bill Stoneman
