Our Farm Stand Is Open — Come See Us Wednesdays!
If you’ve driven by Urban Green Harvest on a Wednesday afternoon lately, you may have noticed a little Farm Stand out front filled with whatever the gardens have given us that week.
We’ve actually been quietly opening the stand for the past few weeks. Once the gardens began producing enough to fill our CSA shares each week—with plenty left to spare—we knew it was time to start sharing more of the harvest with our neighbors, too.
So, we decided it was time to officially introduce our Farm Stand—and share a little more about why it’s about so much more than selling vegetables.
For us, it’s about children, food, community, and what can happen when you give kids the opportunity to do real, meaningful work.
From Seed to Farm Stand
At Urban Green Harvest, our Farm School children are involved in growing food throughout the season.
They plant seeds, tend the gardens, pull weeds, water, watch for pests, harvest vegetables, wash produce, and help prepare what we grow for the Farm Stand.
The stand lets them experience another part of the growing cycle.
The tomato or cucumber they watched develop in the garden becomes something a neighbor takes home and puts on the dinner table.
It makes their work matter in a very tangible way.
It also gives us a place to share the abundance that comes from our little urban farm. Once our CSA members have received their weekly share, we would much rather see the extra food go home with families in our neighborhood than go to waste.
And while the children are sharing that harvest with the community, they’re working toward a pretty exciting goal of their own.
They’re Growing a Jungle Gym
Last year, during our first Farm Stand season, we let the children decide how they wanted to use the money they earned.
Their choice?
A new jungle gym for Farm School.
It was a big goal—bigger than one Farm Stand season—and we loved that.
So this year, they kept going.
This is our second year working toward the same jungle gym, and we’re getting close.
There’s an important lesson in that, too.
Not everything we want happens immediately. Sometimes we have to save. Sometimes we have to work toward something for a long time. Sometimes one season ends before we reach our goal, and we come back the next year and keep working.
The children are learning about saving, patience, delayed gratification, persistence, decision-making, and working together toward something they all want to accomplish.
And when they finally reach their fundraising goal, their education won’t stop there.
It will simply move into the next phase.
Then They Get to Build It
Soon, our Farm School children will get to learn what it takes to turn the money they’ve earned into an actual jungle gym.
With lots of adult guidance and age-appropriate jobs, they’ll be part of the building process—from looking at plans and choosing a location to measuring lumber, identifying tools and hardware, sanding rough edges, assembling pieces, and checking their work along the way.
They’ll help figure out how much lumber and hardware we need, make supply lists, work within a budget, organize materials, divide up jobs, solve problems when something doesn’t fit quite the way we expected, and see a big project through from beginning to end.
There’s math in the measuring.
Science and physics in figuring out how to make a structure strong.
Fine and gross motor development in handling materials and tools.
Problem-solving when the plans on paper meet the reality of building.
Communication and teamwork when several people have to work together.
And confidence that comes from standing back at the end and being able to say:
We did this.
They planted the seeds.
They grew the food.
They harvested it.
They helped run the Farm Stand.
They earned and saved the money.
They chose what to do with it.
And soon, they’ll help build it.
Someday soon, these children will climb onto a jungle gym they helped grow, earn, plan, measure, assemble, and build.
That’s the kind of learning we love at Farm School.
Why Our Farm Stand Is Donation-Based
This is only our second year operating the Farm Stand, and we’re still getting established within our Boise neighborhood.
For now, we’ve chosen to keep things simple. Instead of weighing and individually pricing everything we harvest, our Farm Stand operates on a donation basis.
Visitors choose from the fresh, seasonal produce available that week and leave a donation for what they take home.
We’ve been incredibly grateful for the generosity we’ve seen.
Every donation goes toward the children’s jungle gym project, which means a basket of tomatoes, a handful of peppers, or a bunch of carrots becomes another small step toward a goal they’ve been working on for two growing seasons.
The donation model also gives us a little flexibility to extend generosity within our community when the opportunity arises, while keeping the focus of the Farm Stand on supporting the children’s work and sharing the abundance of our gardens.
It’s simple, it works well for where we are right now, and it has been a wonderful way for our neighbors to be part of what the children are accomplishing.
What Comes Next
As the Farm Stand becomes more established, we plan to transition from our current donation model to individually priced produce.
That will give the children another whole set of practical skills to learn.
They’ll be able to help weigh and price produce, calculate costs, create signs and displays, count money, make change, keep track of inventory, record sales, interact with customers, budget their earnings, and decide together how their money should be used.
Those are lessons in math, communication, entrepreneurship, responsibility, and practical life happening naturally because the children have a real reason to learn them.
And even as the Farm Stand grows, we want generosity and caring for our community to remain part of what the children learn through it.
We want our children to understand how a small farm business works—but we also want them to see that running a business and caring for the people around you don’t have to be separate things.
Come Visit Our Boise Farm Stand
What you'll find at the stand changes from week to week depending on what the gardens are giving us. That's part of the fun of eating locally and seasonally—you never quite know what will be waiting in the baskets.
Our Farm Stand is open to the public:
Wednesdays
1:30–4:30 PM
Urban Green Harvest
Come see what’s growing, take home something fresh for your family, and help our Farm School children get those last few steps closer to their jungle gym.
Choose something you’ll enjoy, leave a donation, and know that your support is helping the children turn something they grew into something they’ve worked hard to earn.
Because around here, a seed can become a cucumber.
That cucumber can become part of a neighbor’s dinner.
A donation can become a piece of lumber.
And that piece of lumber can eventually become part of a jungle gym built by the very children who planted the seed in the first place.
Growing food. Growing skills. Growing community.
That’s what our little Farm Stand is really about.
