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.

Plant sale happening September 24-27

The Woodstock Union High School Agriculture Department will host our second annual Native Plant Sale this fall! The sale will run from 9am to 6pm Wednesday, September 24th and 9am-2pm Thursday, September 25th through Saturday, September 27th. If these dates do not work for you, please contact Abbie (abbie.castriotta@mtnviews.org) to set up an appointment to shop for your plants. 

Native plants are the keystone species for our local food webs. By planting native plants, you are providing food and habitat for insects, birds, and other wildlife. They are adapted to live in our local ecosystems and, therefore, require less maintenance, less water, and no fertilizer. And they are beautiful!

Students in the agriculture classes collected seeds for many of these plants last fall, planted them in pots to cold stratify over the winter, and cared for and divided them over the spring and summer. Now they are ready to be planted into your garden! Fall is a great time to plant native plants because the soil and temperature in the fall provides ideal conditions for new growth. Next spring, the plant will come back strong and ready to bloom. 

We have 32 different species for sale this year! We are offering the native plants at a sliding scale cost ($0 - $15). We estimate that it costs us approximately $5 to grow each native plant though to buy the same plant through a nursery would likely cost $10-$20. All proceeds directly benefit the Woodstock Union 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. The sale will take place behind the Woodstock Union High School. Please bring a cardboard box or tray. 

To learn more about our CRAFT (Community and Climate Resilience through Agriculture, Forestry, and Technology) program visit www.wuhsmscraft.org. Click on the “plant sale information” to see our plant list. 

Spring Plant Sale

The Spring Plant Start Sale at the Woodstock Union HS/MS Greenhouse will run from May 1st-30th and will be open 9am-2pm on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. We will add some days when we are open late.

Students start more than half of our plants by seed and we source some more difficult-to-start plants (think petunias and geraniums) from a nursery that is neonicotinoid free (read more about the effects of neonicotinoids on pollinators here)! We specialize in open-pollinated, organic, and heirloom varieties. Visit our CRAFT website to see our plant start list.

We will also be selling Fedco seeds and seeds saved from our school garden for varieties that you may want to direct-sow in your garden.

We will be holding a plastic plant pot collection drive again. We can only reuse 4-pack and 4” square pots in good condition. We will accept other sized pots and broken pots (if they are #2 or #5 plastic) that we will recycle through a special program but they must be clean and sorted from the 4-packs and 4” pots that we can reuse. As always, bring cardboard boxes if you have them for transporting your plants to your car.

Please contact Abbie (abbie.castriotta@mtnviews.org) with questions.

CRAFT Students Present at Northeast Organic Farming Association Winter Conference

Schuyler, Teagan, and Ayron presented about the importance of native plants and the potential harm that can be perpetuated when we use invasive vs native colonist rhetoric. Using the Multisolving framework, they shared examples of how native plants have been part of their education and have benefited our school campus and community in a multidimensional way.

They demonstrated how to winter sow native plants and each participant got to plant native seeds to transplant at home. It was an honor to be part of this uplifting day that brought farmers and gardeners together from around the state. 

Farmers and gardeners together from around the state enjoy students present at NOFA Winter Conference.

CRAFT at the Youth Climate Leaders Academy

Three CRAFT students participated in and one CRAFT student helped facilitate the Youth Climate Leadership Academy (YCLA) at the Hulbert Outdoor Center last weekend. They were supported by WUHS staff Katrina Jimerson, Janis Boulbol, and Mike Loots and mentored by staff from the Vermont and New Hampshire Energy Education Programs (VEEP/NHEEP) to develop a school-based environmental action project. They attended a variety of leadership development and systems-thinking workshops and were able to interact with 100 students from all over VT and NH working on similar projects. One student shared these reflections about the experience:

“What motivated me to attend YCLA was when I first found out that it was about climate change and how to change something that needs to be fixed in our school. So I thought it seemed really cool to join and talk about what we could do to fix it… The most valuable skill I learned is how to speak nicely to the people that are working in the kitchen that I am going to speak with about the paper plates and how some people get metal forks but they throw them away not thinking that is something that we need and something that we can reuse and something that we do not want to get rid of…The best workshop for me was the one where we were learning about how to do an interview and that was very helpful for me so I would be able to do a better job at doing an interview if we have to do one for my school's project…For next year’s participants, I would say: Be prepared to do a lot of work! When I went there I thought oh yeah it's going to be fun and there is not going to be as much work as there is in a school day but I was wrong; there is a lot more! I’m not saying it is not fun because I really had fun and did not even want to leave the place.”