Category Archives: Uncategorized

“Gardening isn’t about plants,” says Alys Fowler in a recent essay in the British newspaper The Guardian. “It’s about everything else: the soil, the insects, the birds, mammals and reptiles, and how you sit in this world. The plants are the final flourish, the gift of reciprocity from all the others.”

We could not make a better case for building gardens at schools and Continue reading →

Culinary students at Albany High School’s Abrookin Career and Technical Center sampled sampled beans, cucumbers, peppers a host of herbs at our Albany High garden on Thursday of last week and took back to the classroom armloads of corn, a few potatoes, green onions, Swiss chard and more. More than 100 students in five family and consumer science classes took in the Myers Middle School garden on Monday, where juicy red tomatoes were the big attraction. On Tuesday, we had the pleasure of tasting dishes in the Abrookin classroom kitchen that included our potatoes and chard.

It has been a busy few days! And with a new school year upon us and a bit Continue reading →

Sometimes the intended audience for what someone thinks is a great idea does not jump immediately with delight. The first week of school in Albany provides two examples, one involving an offer of luscious vine-ripened tomatoes and the other an offer of an opportunity to move some instruction outdoors.

Neither was embraced with the enthusiasm that we thought would be almost automatic. Perhaps we forgot some of lessons we have learned slowly over the years of digging in the dirt with Albany kids and talking with paid educators about what the Vegetable Project is about. Really, we know from experience that neither group can be rushed into Continue reading →

The Vegetable Project has an important message for some really great friends:

THANK YOU!

We are so grateful for quite a number of generous contributions that we have received in recent months. And we are long overdue in sharing word of each with everyone who follows our efforts to build a bit of doing and touching and tasting and experiencing into teaching and learning in Albany.

The Whitehall Neighborhood Association, led by Robert Murphy, is the Vegetable Project’s 2021 Growing Season Sponsor. The Growing Season Sponsorship, a key piece in the Vegetable Project’s financial and programming puzzle each year, provides vital wherewithal for the breadth of our undertakings, including planting and maintaining gardens at two schools, Continue reading →

Plan ahead! The days will get shorter. And colder. Winter happens. Spring never comes as quickly as we’d like around here. Planting flower bulbs, however, gives us a great reason to stay outside and keep getting our hands dirty in autumn’s chill. It is a great way to add spring color to your garden. And it does even more than that when you buy the bulbs in our Flower Power Fundraiser now through Oct. 15. 

The Vegetable Project receives half of all proceeds raised by our sale of bulbs. And that means that you contribute to our program to create hands-on learning opportunities for Albany kids when you buy bulbs. It means you support our work teaching kids where their food comes from. It means that you support outdoor instruction. More than all of that, your purchase and your planting makes a statement that we can make a difference with kids who deserve teaching and learning that builds on doing and touching and tasting and experiencing.

Please click here to see the selection and place your order: http://vegetableproject.fpfundraising.com.

We installed a native perennial garden at Albany High School in June, right next to our vegetable garden. We hope it will be seen by the school district’s curriculum and instruction mandarins as a useful teaching tool.

We believe that a walking field trip to our garden would pique student interest in how ecosystems function and help students understand why the National Audubon Society calls native plants – plants that grew naturally in a part of the world before we started thinking about moving things from continent to another 531 years ago – “the ecological basis upon which life depends, including birds and people.”

We would wager that students would get why Cornell ornithologist Ken Rosenberg, Continue reading →

It takes a village, as the saying goes, to create opportunities for Albany kids for doing and touching and tasting and experiencing. That means we offer many opportunities for you to pitch in and opportunities for you to make a difference, with others or alone and with and without kids. Here are a few:

Continue reading →

We – the Vegetable Project and two groups of high school students – installed a perennial garden adjacent to our vegetable patch at Albany High on Saturday. With support from Albany Medical College, kids in Albany High English-as-a-new-language teacher Mary Carroll’s classes and participants in a medical college-sponsored STEP (Science and Technology Entry Program) group joined us. We think the heavily used but unmarked North Main Avenue entranceway to Albany High will look a bit more welcoming as our plants grow. And we had a blast!

But far more important than having fun or sprucing up the appearance of what serves these days as the high school’s main gateway, we created opportunities for doing and touching and tasting and experiencing and we placed what we hope will be seen as a useful teaching tool at the disposal of educators.

The particular selection of perennials forms the teaching tool. Everything we planted is native to this part of the world, meaning the plants were here before a certain voyage propelled the idea that we humans could move plants from one continent to another. Five hundred twenty-nine years later, understanding is growing that our choices about what we plant at our homes and schools and parks can contribute to or work against the health of our environment. And that’s pretty important at a time when the climate is changing, species are vanishing and development adds stress to our store of natural resources.

Our schools use biology textbooks that explain the fundamental role of Continue reading →

Thrive Outside, a Vegetable Project initiative offering teachers at Myers Middle School an opportunity to test drive outdoor instruction, launched yesterday, Monday, May 4. The idea is to give educators a chance to learn how teaching outdoors would feel, with the hope that we’ll get rave reviews that will build momentum for the outdoor classroom idea we’ve been jabbering about for years. We’ll see.

But understand, we know from our own experience and from the work of many important thinkers, that children, no, make that people, Thrive Outside. Harnessing the power of exposure to nature will yield positive education results and positive life outcomes, and especially for kids with the greatest challenges in their lives.

It feels good to get to this point, where we have installed rented event tents at the school and have recruited a team of volunteers to show classes around our garden, start seeds with kids and otherwise support teachers who may want a hand in whatever they’ll do. We are thrilled that Principal Bill Rivers, who just came to Myers back in September, has arranged to keep the tents that we brought in until graduation in June, thus providing so many more opportunities for teachers to give teaching outdoors a try. But surely we have work ahead in making the case that teaching and Continue reading →

A year into the Covid-19 pandemic, the medical science community is surer than ever that the safest place to gather with other people is outdoors, The Washington Post reported last week. This understanding should be shaping life in public schools by now, but mostly isn’t.

Schools are going to heroic lengths to resume in-person instruction, with social distancing built into classroom occupancy planning, contact tracing protocols, diligent surface scrubbing and face covering requirements. Still, they’re mostly missing the forest for the trees, failing to even consider the safest way to move away from computer-based instruction – holding classes outside when possible.

We at the Vegetable Project called for such use of the great outdoors before we ever knew the word coronavirus. And we expect to be encouraging it long after the last vaccine is administered. Contact with nature contributes mightily to the emotional and physical heath that our students and educators need to perform well.

It’s just more urgent now than ever before.

–Bill Stoneman