Stunted tomato plants at Myers Middle School are sending a loud and clear message that our garden soil needs attention. So lucky for us that Chad Currin and Noelle Dommasch of BioSoil Farm in Schenectady, which produces low-dose, high-efficiency plant nutrient from food waste, learned about the Vegetable Project recently and paid us the other day.
They gave us 40 pounds of worm castings, offered some quick impressions of Continue reading
Posted in Compost, School garden, Soil, Uncategorized
Please join us. Bring your friends and family.
Enjoy delicious offerings from Berben and Wolff’s Vegan Delicatessen, La Empanada Llama, Restaurant Navona, the Honest Weight Food Co-op, the Capital City Gastropub, Albany Ale & Oyster and the culinary program of Albany High School’s Abrookin Career and Technical Center.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1113763558765057/
Enjoy salsa- and pesto-making demonstrations. Tour the garden. Admire how well apple trees planted two years ago are doing. Learn about the Vegetable Project’s work to create hands-on teaching and learning opportunities, including its outdoor classroom plan. Bring a sample of soil from your garden and for determination of its pH. Tap you feet to the rhythms of Myers music teachers.
— Bill Stoneman
Comments Off on Evening in the Garden on Tuesday, Sept. 11
Posted in Outdoor classroom, School garden, Uncategorized
An outdoor classroom needs a place for students to sit. And with your help, the Vegetable Project intends to provide such seating at Myers Middle School. Won’t you consider contributing to this important project? For a gift of $250, we’ll affix a plaque to a bench near the Myers garden with your personalized inscription, creating a lasting tribute in a space that will be used by Continue reading
Posted in Contact with nature, Outdoor classroom, School garden, Soil, Teaching, Uncategorized
With great thanks to Justin Whittle, who just completed eighth grade at and graduated from Myers Middle School, and Myers visual arts teacher Michelle Patka, we are pleased to present a new logo for the Myers Garden Club. Justin’s design, which reflects the spirit of our after-school and summer-time gathering just about perfectly, creates wonderful new opportunities to get word out about our longest-standing gardening-with-kids initiative. And we are delighted. Launched in the fall of 2010, the Vegetable Project’s Garden Club gets Myers students outside and into a bit of nature throughout the year, gently encourages getting hands dirty in our garden, introduces the taste of really fresh greens and so much more that contributes to wellbeing. We know anecdotally and research confirms that these are effective Continue reading
Comments Off on Myers student captures Garden Club vibe in logo
Posted in Contact with nature, Four-season growing, School garden, Teaching, Uncategorized
Myers Middle School Garden Club: The Summer Edition will meet this summer, its eighth, on Tuesday evenings from 6 to 8 p.m. at the garden behind the school, beginning on June 26.
Students and adults alike are invited to get hands their hands dirty, enjoy the company of other growers and learn about caring for vegetables and other plants once, once in a while or all summer long!
Drop a note to [email protected] for more information.
–Bill Stoneman
Comments Off on Garden Club: The Summer Edition starts next week
Posted in Four-season growing, School garden, Teaching, Uncategorized
We were digging in the dirt the other day when a student shrieked, “A SPIDER,” and then offered to kill it with a handy shovel. We do not encourage chasing down spiders or any other living creatures with a shovel. In fact, quite the opposite.
We talk at every opportunity about the value of spiders, worms and other Continue reading
Comments Off on Soil wildlife grabs hold of students’ attention
Posted in Contact with nature, School garden, Soil, Teaching, Uncategorized
The handful of strawberry plants that we brought to Myers Middle School a few years ago spread like wildfire for some time. But then, for reasons we never figured out, they died way back the last two years. They did not produce berries and they did not produce the runners that start new plants.
Fortunately, things are looking much better this spring. Plants look healthy. Continue reading
Comments Off on Strawberries as a tool for teaching and learning
Posted in Contact with nature, School garden, Science, Teaching, Uncategorized
Considerable research suggests that contact with nature can ease stress, help keep attention where it belongs and sooth emotional pain. A particularly notable paper, published earlier this year, reported on students focusing better in a standard indoor classroom after a lesson taught outdoors than after a lesson in the standard classroom. Insights in these findings could be really important in schools where we work.
And so we develop ideas that would take classes outside, if only for a single class period, and pitch them to teachers. We think that putting teaching and learning in an outdoor setting occasionally could help with the social and emotional underpinnings to successful classroom outcomes. And we would posit that social and emotional needs often pose the biggest issues for students who disrupt and then fail classes with a resounding thud.
Problem is, taking a class outside, with really energetic students, who generally ignore boundaries, feels like a risky proposition to many teachers. And understandably so. It takes some faith to believe that even the most challenging students could become easier to work with after a turn or two or three, even if things look even worse initially.
Maybe it’s too easy for outsiders like us, without direct responsibility for students’ conduct and test scores, to say that it will work. But we still would encourage a couple of thoughts. One is that research, while hardly definitive, paints a compelling picture of the good that seems to come from contact with nature. Another is that command and control efforts in traditional classrooms are not especially successful with the most challenging students.
–Bill Stoneman
Comments Off on For some, taking classes outdoors an act of faith
Posted in Contact with nature, School garden, Teaching, Uncategorized
Many thanks to the Honest Weight Food Co-op for a great piece about the Vegetable Project in the current edition of the Coop Scoop Magazine. Pick up your own copy at the store, at 100 Wavervliet Avenue in Albany, or click here to read. And a big thanks to the Co-op for all sorts of great support, year-in and year-out.
–Bill Stoneman
Comments Off on Co-op offers kind words about garden initiative
Posted in School garden, Uncategorized
We can do something in and around the garden that does not happen in the classroom often enough: capture attention with a moment of pleasant surprise. Take, for example, what happens when we offer a taste of leaves and stems from a live plant.
Some students, of course, cheerfully pop the greens in their mouths. Many Continue reading
Comments Off on Catching student attention with delightful surprise
Posted in Contact with nature, Planting, School garden, Teaching
Strut your stuff in a stylish Vegetable Project T-shirt for $15. It's a great way to show you support creating hands-on learning opportunities for Albany kids.