Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 thevegetableproject@gmail.com 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 thevegetableproject@gmail.com, 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

Want to lend a hand in the Vegetable Project’s gardens on your own schedule? Won’t you please consider helping to water at Albany High School and/or Myers Middle School from now until early October. Claim a week. Or maybe a day of the week for the summer. Or days that work for you. Either way, you’ll make a big difference in this volunteer group’s ability to head into the new school year with gardens teaming with teaching and learning opportunities.

Please reach out at thevegetableproject@gmail.com to arrange a garden walkaround and to learn the ropes with one of our veterans. Or go ahead sign up for days at Albany High here and at Myers here. We will get in touch and plan to meet you to get you started. We won’t leave you alone until you are ready. But please understand, the contribution only begins to make a difference as you start working independently and reliably.

Many thanks for 13 years of great support for our efforts.

–Bill Stoneman

Thank you to everyone who joined the Vegetable Project folks for an Evening in the Garden at Albany High School yesterday, Tuesday, May 9. And many many thanks to everyone on the VegProj team for making it a lovely evening. We are grateful for all your support for our efforts, which come in many different forms.

Then, particularly important business for several individuals, we picked winning tickets for raffles at the event after the holders of those tickets likely left And we hope that we can reach you and arrange to give you what you won. If your numbers match those listed below, please email at thevegetableproject@gmail.com.

Mother’s Day Treat Yourself basket – 060037

Wine & Smile basket – 060047

Grow on You – 060097

Summer Beer basket – 060191

Milk & Cookies basket – 060200

The Navona Gift Card – 060044

50/50 raffle, worth $51.50 to the winner – 744002

— Bill Stoneman