Category Archives: Teaching

One of the great challenges of school gardening in upstate New York is the mismatch between the school calendar and common notions of when the growing season starts and ends. Students aren’t in classes in July when tomato vines look bigger from one day to the next. And January temperatures are not exactly conducive to dividing up perennials.

We at the Vegetable Project, however, are making headway in our bid to redefine the growing season, so that it synchs up with the school calendar a bit better than some would think possible. You might actually say that we’re working to turn the period that begins January and runs through December into growing season, though we don’t expect to be doing quite everything that the word “gardening” implies when the daylight is short and the temperatures fall below freezing.

One initiative involves learning to build and learning to use “season-extending” fixtures, like small hoop Continue reading →

Want to learn how to turn a plastic gallon milk jug into a miniature greenhouse? Would you consider volunteering with the Vegetable Project team as we bring a burst of heart-pounding activity  – widely known as winter sowing – to more than 20 Albany schools classes between late January and early March?

Please join us at one of the following three hour-long training sessions, strictly for your own enjoyment or to prepare to participate in our third annual tour of the school district, bringing more intensive Continue reading →

The Vegetable Project, which leads hundreds upon hundreds of Albany students in getting their hands dirty each year, invites its friends to show their support for the organization’s research-based efforts by sponsoring a garden bed for the 2024 growing season. With gardens at Albany High School and Stephen and Harriet Myers Middle School and a partnership with the Continue reading →

The New York State Food Donation and Food Scraps Recycling Law, adopted in 2019, requires businesses and institutions that generate an annual average of two tons of wasted food per week to donate excess edible food and recycling all remaining food scraps if they are within 25 miles of an organics recycler, such as a composting facility or anaerobic digester. But interestingly, while the law absolutely covers colleges, school systems serving kindergarteners through 12^th graders are specifically exempt from the requirements.

Maybe the state Legislature, in its infinite wisdom, recognized that K-12 schools are already Continue reading →

We organized what we called an Invasive Species Workshop this summer at Myers Middle School with a general awareness that plants and animals from different parts of the world can really disturb stable ecosystems when they’re introduced to places where they don’t belong. And we organized the two-day activity with the conviction that teaching opportunities drawn from our Continue reading →

Sixth graders at Myers Middle School pulled a chunk of Purple loosestrife from soil around the Vegetable Project’s garden at the school on Thursday. The effort — and it was hard work — may not actually do much to curb the spread of the invasive plant that’s easy to spot along roadsides this time of year.

We’re okay with that, however, having organized a two-day Invasive Species Continue reading →

Invasive purple loosestrife has been growing near our garden at Myers Middle School since at least 2017. It’s been outcompeting native wetland plants, like cattails, in the Northeast for at least a couple of decades and is believed to have reached North America from its home in Central Europe as long ago as the early 1800s. So, we have been thinking about how to leverage trying to remove the plant for educational gain for quite a few years.

The Vegetable Project builds teaching and learning around doing and touching and tasting and experiencing because we know that all of that makes a much greater impression than teachers standing in front of a classroom ever can. And seeking to manage an attractive but unfortunately harmful plant in our midst seemed to offer an excellent opportunity.

Purple loosestrife, however, is easiest to identify when it’s in bloom, in August, when few students are around the school. But we were offered time this summer during the school’s Transition Camp for incoming sixth graders to put something together. And we came up with what we’re calling an Invasive Species Workshop, to be held next week, on Wednesday and Thursday, Aug. 23 and 24, involving identifying, mapping and removing the plant. We hope, really expect, to pique interest in the environment and raise awareness of our role in caring for it.

Want to get involved? The more team members we have talking with kids about what invasives are – nonnative plants or animals that disrupt functioning ecosystems – and why we should be concerned about them the better (and we’ll make sure you’re well prepared to have those conversations). Please reach out at [email protected] or 518-728-6799.

–Bill Stoneman

So, the existential question we’re occasionally asked goes something like this: “Do you think digging in the dirt is really going to help those kids learn readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic?”

And serious academic research reinforces our own anecdotal sense of things in saying that exposure to nature contributes mightily to mental health and resilience and strengthens attention and reduces stress, all of which helps children learn.

That sounds important enough to us here at the Vegetable Project to keep doing everything we can to get kids outside and then building teaching and learning around doing and touching and tasting and experiencing.

Goodness knows, sitting at desks in traditional classrooms is not working for many, many students.

“It is time to take nature seriously,” write university researchers in Frontiers in Psychology, “as a resource for learning and development. It is time to bring nature and nature-based pedagogy into formal education – to expand existing, isolated efforts into increasingly mainstream practices.”

We wrapped up another year of after school Garden Club at Stephen and Harriett Myers Middle School on Tuesday of last week. Please join us for the summer edition, Wednesday evenings from 6 to 8 p.m., starting this week, on the 14th! Children, adults, friends, connected with Myers or not.

–Bill Stoneman

We want to show volunteers – perhaps you – around before they start to water our school gardens during the summer of 2023. But then we would be grateful if volunteers would use our online signup tool to let us know when we can plan around their commitment. Please click here to sign up to water at Albany High School. Please click here to sign up for Myers Middle School. And please click here to sign up for North Albany Middle School.

But again, please reach out first, at [email protected], so that we can arrange to show you the ropes. And please know that you will be making a big difference when you take a couple of watering shifts beyond your orientation in this volunteer group’s ability to head into the new school year with gardens teaming with teaching and learning opportunities.

–Bill Stoneman