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The Vegetable Project seeks a teaching candidate to join its team for five to 15 hours a week year-round in Albany schools.

With a mission of creating hands on learning opportunities for Albany children, and especially children with great needs, by building gardens, growing plants and harnessing the power of exposure to nature, we build teaching and learning around doing and touching and tasting and experiencing. We do this in classrooms, after school and over the summer in partnership with a city program that offers work experience to teens.

The position will offer learning experiences that would be especially meaningful for an undergraduate student pursuing a career in teaching or other human services.

Please get in touch at thevegetableproject@gmail.com

Please learn more about the position here.

Our Evening in the Garden is moving to Wednesday, May 7, from tomorrow, May 6. And we hope you can still make it! 

Please celebrate getting kids outside and getting their hands dirty with us at New Scotland Elementary School from 5:30 to 7 p.m. The weather forecast looks more encouraging on Wednesday than it does on Tuesday. We are rounding up pop-up tents. We’ll have you covered.

Please come for the music, the great food, the friends you’ll make or run into. And most of all to say you support building teaching and learning around doing and touching and tasting and experiencing.

–Bill Stoneman

Coming soon to six classrooms near you! Tentatively on Tuesday. Live squiggly decomposing machines. Because we want student engagement when we talk about breaking down organic material. And recycling of nutrient. And nourishing our garden soil. And what the big deal is about the plants that depend on nutrient in that soil (you know, like giving us every bite we’ll eat, directly or indirectly, from birth to death, and producing the oxygen we need to breath — through that amazing chemical reaction known as photosynthesis — and simultaneously converting the sun’s energy into a form that powers Continue reading →

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Those are tomatoes in the picture, in case you can’t tell. They haven’t been totally exposed to the elements. But they have been in the cold, in a shed, for the past few months. And when we suggested to middle school students on Tuesday cutting into them to remove seeds, most balked – at least initially. With observations like, “ew!” and “gross!” and “disgusting!”

Many students, however, quickly overcame Continue reading →

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The teacher who we hope we’ll be doing some work with said almost the moment she came into the conference room that she doubted we could take her students outside, given their poor behavior. She was clearly upset, seemingly because she was asked to meet with us. It wasn’t a good start to a conversation.

Whether we will get the chance to take this teacher’s students outside wasn’t resolved. And that was disappointing.

We make no claim to working miracles. We do not have a magic Continue reading →

Educators are tasked with daunting challenges, and especially in communities with significant numbers of disadvantaged students. This is presumably obvious to everyone who has spent more than a few hours in a classroom lately – professionals themselves, parent classroom volunteers, guest presenters, service providers and perhaps others.

And still, we would urge policy makers and professionals and people in the college and university teacher training programs with all our might to take note of incredible research speaking to the benefits of exposure to nature. Articles in scholarly journals are not so easy to wade through. Two 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 2025 growing season. With gardens at Albany High School and Stephen and Harriet Myers Middle School and a partnership with the Friendship Garden of the Delaware Community, we will mount a handsome sign, 4 inches by 12 inches, on the side of a raised Continue reading →