School news
Spring plant sale in the WUHSMS greenhouse
When?
Thursday, May 7th – Friday, May 29th
Mondays: 9am-2pm
Tuesdays: 9am – 2pm
Wednesdays: closed
Thursdays: 2pm-5pm (except our first day 9am-5pm)
Fridays: 9am-2pm
Saturday/Sunday: closed
Where?
100 Amsden Way, Woodstock. Drive around to the right hand side of the school and park in the spots near the bus barn and football field. The sale is in the big greenhouse.
What?
Students start most of our plants by seed and we source some more difficult-to-start plants from a nursery that is neonicotinoid free! We focus on growing open-pollinated, organic, and heirloom vegetable, herb, and flower varieties. Many of our plants will be available in soil blocks this year (healthier plants and zero plastic waste)!
All proceeds directly benefit the Woodstock Union HS/MS Agriculture Department. Your support helps to ensure that our greenhouse and gardens are thriving spaces where we can continue to teach and learn about agriculture, stewardship, sustainability, and systems thinking through experiential learning. We take cash or checks made out to WUHS with “greenhouse” in the memo line.
Please bring cash or a check, boxes to bring your plants home, and old takeout containers for bringing soil block plants home.
Check out our website to learn more about our program and for our tentative plant list.
This year, we are focusing on selling native, perennial plants — specifically, ones that benefit pollinators — and vegetables/herbs. We will still have many of the fan favorites. See the CRAFT website for the list of plants (subject to change). We will also be selling bird houses, No Mow May signs, and seeds.
CRAFT students sell apple cider waffles with student-made maple syrup at Wassail
CRAFT students Sophia Rosenbach, Aleks Cirovic, Brody Allen, Hannah Lantigne, Ashton Perkins and Lindsey St. Cyr spent several hours in the cold on Saturday selling waffles to the many people at the annual Wassail celebration in Woodstock. People loved the waffles and were pleased to donate to the CRAFT program. Students raised money to help support the different field experiences and speakers we learn from in CRAFT.
9th graders engage in stewardship & service learning
Last Thursday, the 9th grade students completed the final phase of preparing about 16,000 square feet of underused campus land to become a vibrant pollinator habitat. Working with community partner David Hammond, founder and director of Creating Habitat for Pollinators, students helped with the final tilling, then mixed, spread, and rolled native and annual seed mixes that will bloom next academic year. Students also cleaned up the pollinator hedgerow, labeled shrubs and trees, and learned how to harvest native seeds.
This collaborative, student-led project is part of WUHSMS’s CRAFT program and provides an authentic experience in service learning and environmental stewardship.
After the experience, students reflected on something they enjoyed, something they found challenging, and something they thought next year’s students might benefit from. Below are a few quotes that capture the reflection of students:
I really like getting seeds from the flowers and seeing all the different shapes and sizes. One thing that was challenging was separating the seeds from the other parts of the flowers. It was fun. - Sawyer
I enjoyed putting the tags on the plants. I had fun learning the types of plants in the hedgerow. Next year’s students benefit from the amount of pollinators that visit next year. - Heidi
I spread seeds, moved equipment with the wheel barrel, and ended with thatching the hillside. Moving things with the wheel barrel was really fun. I also enjoyed spreading seeds. - Benny
Next year’s students may have the pleasure of enjoying the presence of a higher biodiversity of butterflies. - Vitus
I found tilling to be the most fun because it was with my friends. I found raking the hill next to the football field challenging as it felt like little progress was being made. Next year’s students will benefit by having nice flower beds and a lot more pollinators on our school campus. - Bray
I enjoyed chilling outside and measuring a bit. It was a little hard to set the precise length of the rows [when calculating total square footage]. Next year’s students will have the plants, which will help them study pollinators easier. - Gray
Acknowledgements
This learning opportunity was made possible by David Hammond, Abbie Castriotta, Nick Wolfe, Lauren Sullivan-Justice, Jason Tarleton, Kat Robbins, Janis Boulbol, Kevin Nunan, Keith Brayton, Karen Ganey and Orion Binney, along with the many teachers who contribute their energy to prioritize wellness on our campus. Special thanks to our photographer, Monica Darling!
CRAFT students and teachers present at the Vermont Pollinator Working Group Conference
The Vermont Pollinator Working Group invited the CRAFT (Community and Climate Resilience through Agriculture, Forestry, and Technology) Program to present about native plant and pollinator work as part of the education track at their annual conference. The Working Group is a collaboration of nonprofits, farmers, gardeners, and policy makers working to tackle threats to pollinators in Vermont and the Northeast and is looking to expand its education initiatives.
On Friday morning, Students Maya Sluka and Schuyler Hagge along with teachers Abbie Castriotta and Samantha DeCuollo traveled to the conference at UVM where they listened to lightning talks and connected with folks doing pollinator work around the state. The CRAFT program kicked off the education presentations in the afternoon. They described the importance of pollinators and native plants in public education, how the work fits into the curriculum across many subjects and grade levels, their participation in real-world community science projects, and the joy that this place-based work brings to students. After listening to the other presentations, the group participated in a discussion on how the Working Group may be able to support pollinator education initiatives across the state. Conference attendees were inspired by the CRAFT students' work and ideas.
Schuyler Hagge and Maya Sluka
Planting the future: A freshman's intro to CRAFT
By Isla Segal ‘29
This op-ed first appeared in the October 2, 2025 edition of The Vermont Standard
This past week, I was one of the dozens of kids from Woodstock Union High School that took a field trip to the King Farm to plant chestnut trees and make applesauce. CRAFT, which stands for Community and Climate Resilience Through Agriculture, Forestry, and Technology, is a program at the high school that focuses on nature and sustainability. Students can take classes, such as Economics and the Environment or Regenerative Agriculture, to get CRAFT credits. Once they earn 6 credits in this pathway, they graduate with a CRAFT certification on their transcript. Outside of the certification, the program offers opportunities such as the trip to King Farm, where we as students can work with nature and be out in the world, making a difference.
When we got to school on Tuesday morning, about thirty students gathered in the lobby and went up to the nearby King Farm. This is a property the Vermont Land Trust owns, and our school is partnering with them to do projects such as this one on the land. We stacked firewood and sliced apples that a class had picked at Billings Farm earlier that week, then started boiling them down to make applesauce.
An hour in, many more students came after attending their first class on campus. We talked about the history of chestnut trees and passed around seedlings and pieces of chestnut wood. We planted chestnuts because it’s a tree that has many uses, from wood for furniture to food to eat, and there used to be chestnuts in Vermont and throughout the east coast. They were wiped out about a hundred years ago by a blight. We hope that we can help bring chestnuts back by planting these trees, so we partnered with the American Chestnut Foundation. The small trees we planted grew from seeds harvested from a rare, wild, mature American Chestnut tree in Vermont. The seeds were propagated at our school in air pruning beds. Air pruning beds are raised garden beds with a mesh netting above the ground so that when roots grow through the netting, they dry out and die, causing a more dense root system. What we planted were baby trees, about a foot tall, with several leaves, and a root system about a foot deep. We dug holes into the ground, placed the plants in, and added a soil mix that had pine duff, which helps chestnut trees grow. We put tubes around the top of the tree to help protect it from deer browse and tied those tubes to a stake in the ground. Finally, we watered them and covered the surrounding ground with cardboard to limit weeds. I got to plant two chestnut trees, one in the field, and another in the woods above it, because we tried to plant in both open and forested environments to compare the resiliency of the trees. It was cool to plant multiple trees, because the first time, I was figuring out the process, but by the second time, my partner and I had techniques and we knew what to do. Overall that day, we planted about fifteen trees, and we’ll plant more next year as a part of a several-year-long project.
I find it awesome to have the King Farm property near our school, and I feel so lucky to be able to use it. Currently, some of the older CRAFT students are in a pilot class with the goal of working in collaboration with Vermont Land Trust to design a plan for the property that will incorporate sustainable growing and harvesting practices and make it more open to the community. I look forward to watching these plans unfold and become reality through my years at Woodstock and beyond when I come back to visit.
The morning was my first experience with CRAFT, as I’m a freshman, and it felt like a comfortable community, and the kind of people I want to be around. We had everyone from ninth graders to seniors, and they were all joking around as we sliced apples, or talking to me as we walked up the hill. There were so many different people there, with varied interests, who take different classes, or sit with different people at lunch, but we had all come that morning to be outside, and make applesauce, and get our hands covered in soil, and that brought us all together. I’m glad as I go into high school to have even more role models and friends from other grades, who I can look up to, or who I’ll know when I walk into a new class.