For students

Help combat hunger in your community, and earn service hours.

Become part of your school's Sustainable farm crew, and learn how to grow produce using a vertical hydroponic tower.

Administered at your school by Sustainable Support Team, a 501(c)(3) public charity.

What you do

Train first
You will use the App and a garden tower for a fun training series. You will then move on to become a student farmer.
Pick your times
The app offers duties that fit your schedule. Accept, trade, or release them.
Check each tower
At each tower, the app asks for one reading at a time, then a photo of the tower.
Harvest for the pantry
Cut, weigh, package and label each harvest. The app records the weight and the crop.

After training, you do daily tower care with no adult present. That includes adding plant food and a diluted pH solution your coordinator prepares. You 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.

What you get

A documented recordThe App will record every shift including dates and tasks performed. Your coordinator approves each shift, so your record shows who confirmed your work. You can access your file at all times.
Your recorded community service hoursAt the end of the semester, SST will provide a Certificate of Completion, a compilation of your individual contribution to the program, and total Community Service hours earned. This can be attached to your college application.
Growing food for a purposeYou will become aware of the challenges that face many in your community as they struggle to feed their families. Participating in this program lets you become part of the solution.

How to join

You join by invitation, through your school's farm crew. The first pilot farms are planned to start in January 2027.

Find the farm's poster
Look for it at your school, or ask at the school farm.
Scan the code on it
A short form opens, and you sign up with your email. No phone? Ask your coordinator to put you on the farm crew's sign-up sheet.
Your coordinator confirms you
The adult at school who coordinates the farm tells us you're a student there. Then we email you an invitation.
Open your invitation
Open the email on your own phone or computer and follow the steps.

Before your first duty, a parent or guardian signs our parent packet on paper. It describes every task, and they can say no to you adding plant food or pH solution. Your district signs a student data agreement with us before any student joins, and we'll publish the app's privacy notice on this site before then.

The app will be on the App Store and Google Play when the first pilot farms start. Your invitation shows you how to set it up.

No farm at your school?

It may not have one yet. A teacher, counselor, or club adviser can start one. Send them this site: sustainablegardens.com.

Email a teacher about it For parents and guardians

Last updated October 2026.

Sustainable Gardens is a program of Sustainable Support Team, Inc. (SST). In this notice, "we" means SST.

This website sets no cookies, runs no scripts, and shows no advertising. Everything on it comes from this site, and it loads nothing from any other website. There's no account, and it doesn't build a profile of you or follow you around the web. Your Light or Dark choice is never sent to us.

Like every website, this one is delivered by a web host, Cloudflare. To deliver pages and block attacks, it processes each visitor's IP address and basic request details, such as the page requested and the browser used. We use that information only to keep the site secure, never to identify or follow visitors.

If you email support@sustainablegardens.com, we use what you send to answer you and to follow up on what you asked about. Your email is delivered by Google Workspace, our email provider, and read by the company that builds and runs Sustainable Gardens for SST. We never sell it or use it for marketing. To ask us to delete what you've sent, email support@sustainablegardens.com, and we'll delete it unless the law requires us to keep it.

If you use the school enquiry form, we collect your name, your email address, your role, your school's name, city, and state, and when you'd like to start, plus your school district and anything else you write, if you give them. Your enquiry is saved first in a database that Convex runs for us. Then our web host, Cloudflare, emails it to the company that builds and runs Sustainable Gardens for SST, which reads it and replies to you. That email is delivered by Google Workspace, our email provider.

Our web host limits how many enquiries one internet connection can send in a minute, to stop abuse. Your IP address isn't saved with your enquiry or sent to the database.

We keep saved enquiries, and the emails about them, as SST's record of which schools have asked about Sustainable Gardens. We don't delete them on a schedule. Enquiries our spam check flags are never emailed, and once a day we delete any that are more than 14 days old. If a student sends us the form, we reply once to ask them to have a teacher contact us, and then we delete what they sent. A deleted enquiry can stay in the database company's own records for a short time before it's erased for good.

We use your enquiry to reply to you and, if your school goes ahead, to set your school up in the Sustainable Gardens app. We never sell it or use it for marketing. To ask us to delete your enquiry, email support@sustainablegardens.com, and we'll delete it from our database and our mailboxes unless the law requires us to keep it.

This notice covers this website only. The Sustainable Gardens app will have its own privacy notice, saying what the app keeps and who can see it. We'll publish it on this site before any student joins.

This site isn't meant for children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect their information. Questions about privacy? Email support@sustainablegardens.com.

Help combat hunger in your community, and earn service hours.

What you do

What you get

How to join

No farm at your school?

Privacy notice

Accessibility