Start your own garden this year, maybe in a couple of planters on the front porch, or maybe add a few square feet to that special space – for the beauty you’ll create, for the hope you’ll inspire and for the stewardship of our environment you’ll provide. And please support the Vegetable Project when you do by buying High Mowing Organic Seeds from us from now until Friday, March 20.
We are spending some time with students these days exploring fairly inscrutable language on seed packs discussing when to plant the seeds and whether in containers indoors or in the garden soil. We do this each year partly because the information the exercise reveals useful information. The grower who puts tomato seeds in the soil in April or who sows onion seeds in July will be disappointed.
But we also like that this is a great way to start conversations about biodiversity, the amazing adaptations that evolution makes possible and the Continue reading →
Winning prize? Bragging rights, if you do not need any more information from us. And note that seed packs typically provide information for figuring this out, that the calculations are not that difficult, but that seed pack instructions are not always worded so clearly.
We often show kids how to figure this out around this time of year. It’s a nice low-key way to open the door to conversations about biodiversity, climate change or particulars about the seasons that we don’t always notice. And if doing before talking helps make these serious subjects feel more meaningful to some students than a classroom lecture might, we will suggest this exercise as a small model of teaching and learning.
Teaching is central to the Vegetable Project’s mission – to create 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.
To the extent possible, however, we try to approach teaching from a different angle than leading mainstream classroom models. When we speak Continue reading →
Children fall in love with fruits and vegetables when they have opportunities to grow them, prepare them, and try them again and again, says Curt Ellis, co-founder and chief executive officer of Food Corps in a most wonderful New York Times piece about empowering grade school students to help guide cafeteria menu decision-making in Portland, Ore. “It’s about helping them discover what they love to eat rather than telling them what they should eat.”
We have sought many times to make roughly the same point, but certainly have to give Mr. Ellis kudos for saying it better than we ever have. And thanks so much to our good friend Melissa Bourgeois for bringing the article to our attention.
We know from our experience that kids will try things when they’re with us that they would not otherwise. Time and again, we’ve seen kids beg off, see a friend taking a bite and then say, “Oh, okay, I’ll try it.” And often enough, the next words are, “That was good.”
We’re growing greens indoors, under grow lights right now, with the intention of developing tasting events in the cafeterias where we work. We’ll let you know how we do.
Second graders, it appears, can get the grocery shoppers in their homes to buy more fruits and vegetables, university researchers say, at least when the young students have learned a bit about nutrition in a Continue reading →
The Vegetable Project’s fourth annual Evening in the Garden is set for Wednesday, Sept. 18, at the garden at Myers Middle School. You won’t want to miss it. The food will be great. We’ll show you around the garden. Learn from demonstrations. Bring a sample of your garden soil and we’ll measure the pH for you.
The garden is behind the school building. We’ll move inside if it rains.
We would be pleased if you would let us know that you are coming at Eventbrite or our Facebook event.
We would be grateful if you would stand up and be counted as a friend of our all-volunteer effort to create hands-on learning opportunities for Albany kids with great needs by becoming a member of the event’s honorary committee. We will include your name in an event program when you make a $25 contribution. Again, please visit Eventbrite.
Many thanks for 10 years of support. Please look for the Vegetable Project on Facebook, Instagram and Evenbrite for word of the fabulous local eateries that are contributing to this event. And please help us spread the word.
With some concern about whether the least expensive and easiest-to-use tools are the most accurate, measuring pH and presence of macronutrients in our garden soil last week suggest that we have some work to do. Readings vary from one location to another. And trying to match colors of solutions with printed colors is more difficult than you might Continue reading →
To build better approaches to the kids who do not respond well to being told, “Sit still in your chair” and “Look up at the board” and “Start planning for college.”
To get kids outside.
To expose kids to thinking about what they eat.
To offer an opportunity to build foundation knowledge the way our brains really work, by making connections with what we already know, which in academic terms means across disciplines and nonlinearly.
To inspire inquiry and discovery.
To encourage a love of learning, which does not happen when accompanied with something like, “You better learn this. It’s going to be on a test on Friday.”
To connect learning to the real world.
To create experiences.
To flop the usual school approach to teaching around, by starting with interesting questions instead of a long list of facts.
The Vegetable Project in Albany, N.Y., established in 2009, creates hands-on learning opportunities that involve science, the environment, entrepreneurship, tasting really fresh food and responsibility for care of living things by growing vegetables and other plants.
Support the Vegetable Project with a tax-deductible donation.
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Save those boxtops
Saving Boxtops for Education is just one of the ways you can help us buy grow lights, red wriggler worms, materials we use to build greenhouses and more. Find the boxtops on scores of packaged products.
Start your own garden this year, maybe in a couple of planters on the front porch, or maybe add a few square feet to that special space – for the beauty you’ll create, for the hope you’ll inspire and for the stewardship of our environment you’ll provide. And please support the Vegetable Project when you do by buying High Mowing Organic Seeds from us from now until Friday, March 20.
