A living grow lab in your classroom, cared for by students every day and harvested together in week four. You get the engagement, belonging and family-engagement evidence for your evaluation and school improvement plan. Your teacher gets a plug-and-play grow kit, and we handle the rest.
Run it this fall or winter and your results are in hand before the spring climate survey.
Oliver walks you through what a BYFP grow lab brings to your classroom.
Every pilot ends with a short evidence packet built around the goals Massachusetts principals answer for.
Plants need checking every day and harvest days are events students do not want to miss. We give you an attendance snapshot for the four program weeks to set beside the weeks before.
Students take a short survey on day one and harvest day. You get a class-level summary of how connection to classmates, adults and school moved, student feedback you can file as evaluation evidence.
A ready-to-run Family Harvest Night: multilingual invitations, an agenda, a sign-in sheet and a family survey. Families taste what their kids grew, and you keep the documentation.
Every activity prints with its Massachusetts standard codes and learning outcomes. The 50+ activities span science and engineering practices, data and statistics, nutrition and balanced eating, and the CASEL competencies, so the unit maps to what your teachers already have to cover across the grade band, not just one grade’s science test.
A strategy paragraph with one outcome measure, ready to paste into your plan, plus a slide for your next council meeting.
Students plant their first tray of kale and discover how a tiny seed holds a whole plant.
Students plant arugula and start exploring where their food comes from, and what it does for their bodies.
Students plant radish and trace their food back to its source, thinking in systems.
Out come the scissors. Students harvest, taste and reflect on the whole journey together.
No outside visitors to schedule and no gardening background needed. Prep before the first session takes less than 30 minutes, and printing a week of lessons takes five.
Wire rack, LED grow lights and timer, pots, soil and seed for all three crops.
Teachers pick a grade from 3 to 6 and get a ready plan for each week. Printed plans are self-contained, so a substitute can run a session.
A real person picks up when something looks wrong, usually the same day.
Students taste plain kale, arugula and radish they grew in the room. Plain produce is exempt from the state’s competitive food rules. We send families the crop list ahead of time and give your nurse a one-page checklist, with soap-and-water handwashing built into every harvest.
Real experiments with something students can touch, measure and take ownership of. Nutrition education stops being a worksheet when they are eating greens they grew. A new crop every week keeps attention high from planting to harvest.
Students work as a team to keep something alive and find out they can do more than they thought. The same tray opens into systems thinking, the food system, food insecurity and nutrition issues, with extensions that give sixth graders and up the complexity they can handle.
Every school runs it differently. Some teachers want a grow lab and freedom. Others want every lesson planned.
Your teachers take the rack, seeds and lights and build their own unit around them. We are a phone call away if they need us.
Choose the activities that fit your goals, from plant science to nutrition to reflection, and weave them into what you already teach.
Four weeks of lessons designed for you, standards-aligned and ready to print. Your teachers do not have to plan a thing.
Delivered to your door and simple to set up, with a step-by-step guide and video to walk you through it.
A short walkthrough is all it takes. No growing experience needed.
Online scaffolding and standards-aligned lessons we build, ready to teach.
Stuck on anything? Call us. A real person picks up.
One tidy rack. No outdoor space, no plumbing, fits any classroom.
A four-week arc, a few minutes of care a day, a harvest they can eat.
This is not a box of random activities. Every session maps to age-appropriate learning outcomes, built into the Massachusetts STE (2016) and Health & PE (2023) frameworks and the CASEL competencies.
A complete grow lab is $1,000, and it covers a full program cycle for up to 84 students, about $12 each. Three or four classrooms can share one, and larger schools can add a second lab.
The rack is yours to keep. To grow again, reload seeds and soil for about $4 per student — from us or on your own.
What’s in the boxThey now have knowledge of how food is grown, transported and all the resources needed to produce a single dinner.
Most of all, they loved to eat the microgreens. I wish we had more of these experiences for more students.
Oliver and his team bring real urban-farming expertise to our faculty and students, growing produce from seed right in our STEM classroom.
There’s nothing like getting your hands dirty, nurturing a young plant, and then getting to eat it.
Since 2022, our team has run the program in 16 Boston schools.
We think that’s worth fixing, not with a worksheet, but with a tray of seeds on their own desk. Boston Youth Farm Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We started by teaching in Boston classrooms ourselves, and still do, in a small number of schools each term. What we learned there is what makes the grow lab work in your hands.
Our story
Get a grow lab into your classroom this term, we'll help you fund it.