We avoid a number of outdoor issues when we start seeds and nurture small plants indoors: Heavy rain and lashing winds don’t bother as at all. And no one walks off with almost-ready-to-harvest watermelons.
We face other hazards, however, such as occasional inability to visit our plants. Continue reading
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Posted in Four-season growing, School garden, Teaching
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.
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
Comments Off on Spring is just around the corner
Posted in School garden, Teaching
When you hold a ruler against something you need to measure, you can be sure that the six-inch mark really is six inches from an end of the ruler. It isn’t so easy, however, to measure soil pH.
We discovered in the fall that different tools sometimes produce starkly different results with a single sample of soil. In one instance, we came up with an acidic 5.0 when we tested with pH paper and an alkaline 8.0 with a system that mixes soil with an indicator solution. So what to do? And do user errors or Continue reading
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
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Posted in School garden, Teaching
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
Comments Off on Better than, “No dessert until you eat your peas”
Posted in 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.