Category Archives: School garden

Start your garden with High Mowing Organic Seeds

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Put spring on your calendar and contribute to the Vegetable Project by planning a garden with High Mowing Organic Seeds.  Your purchase of certified organic seeds helps raise money for the Vegetable Continue reading

Spring is just around the corner

A pile of snow on the ground today doesn’t change the fact that spring is on the way. And we are getting ready for it.

High Mowing seed packs

We have been starting seeds indoors for three weeks now, not so much to produce plants that will go outdoors as to put our Garden Club students through some important paces – noting in our journal what we plant, watering, carefully observing when we experiment, such as by trying the same seeds in different media. We’re also getting ready for spring by thinking now about what

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Our never-ending growing season

Spinach very much prefers growing in cool weather.

Spinach very much prefers growing in cool weather.

Mother Nature and the school calendar present a couple of challenges to school gardeners in this part of the world. Conventional wisdom, for example, says do not put tomatoes in the soil around here until late May because a late frost, which would kill the tender plants, still is possible until then. But Continue reading

A cold winter day’s update

Greenhouse

Our greenhouse withstood the recent high winds.

I know the winter isn’t over. But I am going to go out on a limb and say that we have made considerable strides in our greenhouse engineering. The plastic sheathing on our largest structure did not make it through the winter last year, but is looking quite good at the moment. It was standing up fine this morning to the kind of wind that really tests its mettle.

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The kids eat first

We are often asked what we do with food that we grow. The basic answer is kids come first.

As much as anything else, we simply turn to the students who are in the garden – during our Garden Club, for example – and ask, “Want to take something home?” Continue reading

The dirt on Myers soil

The steel dandelion puller that I tried to poke into the lawn where we would start a garden four years ago bent before I could dig more than an inch deep. The earth was that miserably hard. We have a great southern exposure at our site, giving us lots of beautiful sunshine. But we have struggled with the ground beneath our feet since the beginning. Continue reading

Better than, “No dessert until you eat your peas”

          Brief moments in our garden behind Myers Middle School in Albany, N.Y., can go a long way toward explaining what we’re doing. And so each of the Vegetable Project’s adult volunteers probably has an anecdote that captures some of our purpose and some of our accomplishment. One of my recent favorites is from September, just after school opened, when we took class after class out to walk around our heirloom tomatoes and sweet potatoes and cucumbers and beans and squash and many different leafy greens. Continue reading