High school students will grow lettuce, tomatoes, herbs and other produce using vertical hydroponic towers. They will harvest their crops and donate to a local food bank, and then participate in distributing the fresh food to their neighbors.
Student? How to joinParent or guardian? What to know
Administered at your school by Sustainable Support Team, a 501(c)(3) public charity.
Students will perform all aspects of growing crops, including germinating seeds, nourishing and tending to the plants, checking and adjusting pH, harvesting, and packaging for donation.
In the app, then at a real tower, before they do any task on their own.
Duties come from each student's availability. Students accept, trade, or release them, and a student farm crew lead picks up any duty still open late in the day.
At each tower, the app asks for one reading at a time, then a photo of the tower.
Harvests are weighed, labeled by tower, and taken to your food pantry. Your coordinator approves the week's shifts on one screen.
No. Students take duties outside class: before school, in a free period, at lunch, or after school. Some districts count only hours earned outside the school day. If yours does, students can choose duties before or after school only.
Once a week they visit, check every tower, and make up the diluted pH bottle the students use. In the app, they approve the week's shifts on one screen. The app builds the schedule, so nobody makes one by hand. You can name more than one coordinator.
We'll go through costs, and who owns the towers, on our first call.
After training in the app and at a real tower, students do daily tower care with no adult present. That includes adding plant food and a diluted pH solution the coordinator prepares. They wear the gloves and eye protection we supply for that step, and every supply station has an eyewash bottle. Students 15 and under don't add plant food or pH solution. Your coordinator checks every tower each week. Before a student's first duty, a parent or guardian signs our parent packet on paper. It describes every task, lets a parent say no to their student adding plant food or pH solution, and includes an emergency and medical form. Your school can add its own forms.
Every harvest is labeled with its tower, the date and time it was cut, the crop's name, "not washed," and the name and phone number of the adult responsible. Nothing cut more than a day before delivery goes out. The pantry's own food safety rules decide what it accepts.
Students use their own phone and a personal email, not school accounts or Chromebooks, so the app needs no district account. Where your school's phone rules don't allow phones during the day, duties during the school day use a garden iPad. A student without a phone uses a garden iPad that Sustainable Support Team owns and locks to the app. Your IT office allows the app's web addresses and runs a short network check, using an IT pack we email before the first signup.
Your district's data office signs a student data agreement with us before any student joins. The app keeps what a service record needs: a student's full name, personal email, school, and graduation year, their birth month and year (never the day), used only for the age rules, plus the times they're free, their shifts, tower readings, a tower photo each visit, and a short reflection after each shift, spoken or typed. We keep the text and delete the recording. When a student checks in, the phone works out whether they're at the garden and sends us only that answer, never their location. The app keeps its own service logs so it can run. It contains no analytics or advertising code from other companies. The app's privacy notice will list every company that handles student data for us, including the AI services. We'll publish it on this site before any student joins.
Each duty a student works becomes a shift, and your coordinator attests each one. The App records every shift, the work done, and the adult who attested it. Students also earn hours for training. At the end of the semester, SST provides a Certificate of Completion with total Community Service hours earned. Your school, or a scholarship program, decides what the hours count toward.
Each school chooses: close for the summer with a final harvest and a cleanup, or keep a summer farm crew going.
Not yet. The first pilot farms are planned to start in January 2027.
No farm is running yet. The first pilot farms are planned for January 2027, with a small number of schools.
This form is for adults: school and district staff, and parents or volunteers working with a school. If you're a student, here's how to join a farm crew.
Sustainable Gardens is a program of Sustainable Support Team, Inc. (SST). In this notice, "we" means SST.
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If anything is hard to see, hear, read, or use, email support@sustainablegardens.com or tell your school's farm coordinator, and we'll get you the information another way and fix the problem.