Vegetable Project in Albany, NY

One amaryllis plant at Stephen and Harriet Myers Middle School seems a bit mixed up a few days ago. Members of its cohort -- we placed about 100 potted bulbs in classrooms around the school building back in the winter -- mostly bloomed in February and March. We moved 40 plants into garden soil in June so they could soak up all the sunlight possible until encouraging dormancy in October. And we certainly didn't expect to see a colorful display in the summer. Maybe this one never flowered when the others did.

Stephen and Harriet Myers Middle School students, friends, family and, well, everyone else, are invited to the summer edition of the Vegetable Project's long running Garden Club, on Tuesday evenings Tuesday from 6 to 8 p.m. We will dig in the dirt, do some planting, some harvesting, some learning, some getting the garden ready for many class visits planned for September. And maybe most of all, we will meet one another!

Hope to see you this week, on Tuesday, July 14!

Capital Region educators, education leaders and other interested community members: You are invited to the inaugural Teaching in the Garden Workshop at Siena University on Monday, Aug. 24!

Learn about nuts and bolts issues such as garden maintenance and community/family engagement, emerging trends like farm to table programming and pulling it all together with outdoor and place-based education curriculum.

Please sign up here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdGDraTisVL5zQz2vNNbhhvpB86G0GJebVMoNyujuwXwgSFvg/viewform or drop email to [email protected]. And please do it soon, as space is limited for this first time around.

Whether you are thinking about launching a garden program or furthering work you have already started, this workshop is for you! Come interested; come curious.

The workshop, a collaboration of Siena, the Schenectady City School District's Farm to School Project and the Vegetable Project, will be on the Siena campus in Loudonville from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. with breakfast and lunch provided. Six continuing teaching and leadership education credits will be offered to interested attendees.

Tentative Agenda:
8:30 - Arrival and breakfast
9:00 - Guest Speaker
10:00 -12:15 - Model Lessons & Debrief/Planning
12:30 - 1:30 - Lunch
1:30 -2:15 - Panel Presentation
2:30-3:00 - Roundtable Discussions
3:00-3:30 - Wrap Up

We hope to see you there!
Jenni Suriano, Siena University
Rebekka Henriksen, Farm to School; Schenectady CSD
Bill Stoneman, Vegetable Project

And if you are unable to attend this year’s event, but are interested in a similar one in the future, please complete the Google Form. This workshop is a pilot step toward a larger conference that we hope to host in the very near future.

The pink blob resting on the garden fork tine on Thursday had four legs and a beating heart! It could not have been too old, but we certainly do not have the knowledge to guess whether that meant hours or days. Heck, we're not even sure if it's a mouse or a mole or a vole. We never get a good enough look at the small creatures scampering around our gardening at Stephen and Harriet Myers Middle School.

We're hosting a worksite right now for Albany's Summer Youth Employment Program. And high school students who were assigned to spend five weeks with us found this little guy, or maybe gal, while turning compost.

This is life.

We build teaching and learning around doing and touching and tasting and experiencing -- because we know that it works.

Stephen and Harriet Myers Middle School students, friends, family and, well, everyone else, are invited to the summer edition of the Vegetable Project's long running Garden Club, on Tuesday evenings Tuesday from 6 to 8 p.m. We will dig in the dirt, do some planting, some harvesting, some learning, some getting the garden ready for many class visits planned for September. And maybe most of all, we will meet one another!

Assemblymember Gabriella Romero, seen here chatting with the Vegetable Project's Hailee Smith (left), visited our garden at Stephen and Harriet Myers Middle School on a hot Monday afternoon. And we are grateful for her interest in our work to get kids outside and get their hands dirty. We build teaching and learning in the City School District of Albany around doing and touching and tasting and experiencing -- because we know that it makes a difference.

Stephen and Harriet Myers Middle School students, friends, family and, well, everyone else, are invited to the summer edition of the Vegetable Project's long running -- this picture here is from 2011 -- Garden Club, starting this Tuesday, June 23, from 6 to 8 p.m. We will dig in the dirt, do some planting, some harvesting, some learning, some getting the garden ready for many class visits planned for September. And maybe most of all, we will meet one another!

Stephen and Harriet Myers Middle School students, friends, family and, well, everyone else, are invited to the summer edition of the Vegetable Project's long running Garden Club, starting this Tuesday, June 23. We will dig in the dirt, do some planting, some harvesting, some learning, some getting the garden ready for many class visits planned for September. And maybe most of all, we will meet one another.

The last of nearly 40 amaryllis bulbs was placed in the soil at Stephen and Harriet Myers Middle School, where they will all spend the summer preparing -- by harnessing the sun's energy to turn water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and sugar molecules -- for a long nap in a cool dark place in the fall, before we move it back into a lighted environment and see if we can coax it to flower next winter. We do not have this down to a science yet. But we are working on it.