The Nashville Food Project’s Blog
You're Invited!
ITOP students take a break to play and be carefree on their last workday of the semester at the Wedgewood garden.
We are partnering with the Frist Center and the Oasis Center’s International Teen Outreach Program (ITOP) to create a unique art installation in celebration of the United Nations' World Refugee Day. Join us at our Wedgewood Urban Garden from noon until 2pm on Saturday, June 20th, when teaching artist Daniel Furbish and the teens will unveil their artwork. The Wedgewood garden is located at 613 Wedgewood Avenue. Additional street parking is available along Benton Avenue. Hope to see you there!
Dinner Made Easy
This fabulous mother-daughter duo visited their plot at the McGruder Community Garden and left with harvest bags stuffed with sugar snap peas and all kinds of cooking greens--mustards, turnips and collards oh my!
Goodlettsville Middle School
We want to extend our sincerest appreciation for the students at Goodlettsville Middle School who designed and implemented a concessions business to raise money for local causes. We are the humbled and grateful recipient of a generous donation from these young social entrepreneurs. They not only came to present their donation, but happily jumped into several garden projects - on the coldest day of spring! Huge thanks to these students! You are an inspiration!
Getting their Adventure On!
Team Green volunteers rocked a recent Saturday morning volunteer session at our Wedgewood Urban Garden. These folks know how to work hard and have fun doing it. We can't wait til they come back.
Simply Beautiful
Our spring crops are thriving as we await the much anticipated summer fruits. Pictured here starting from the bottom is a bed of buckwheat, two beds of leaf lettuce, a bed of chard, snow peas (yum!), and finally the tall grass in the background is winter rye. Want to help harvest or pull a few weeds? Drop by anytime.
Salad Train
This year's lettuce harvest has allowed us to include beautiful salads on over 2,000 meals thus far. This photo is one of the beautiful salads we've made that included TNFP lettuce, strawberries from Nashville Grown and hard boiled eggs from Foggy Hollow. Thanks to all the hundreds of volunteers that planted, tended, harvested, washed, chopped and made these tasty dishes to help us nourish our community.
Many Friends
Our onions are growing strong. Thanks to this awesome group from Friends Life for mulching them well with straw to keep the soil cool and moist. Thanks friends!
A Splash of Color
Our stir fry entrees were topped with TNFP grown cilantro and served along side our fresh salads. This meal made for a colorful week in our prep room and garden. We hope you are enjoying spring produce!
In the garden
GM Financial sent out their A-team to volunteer recently in our gardens. They turned compost, planted carrots, and harvested spinach without one word of complaint on the first day to break 90 degrees this year. Thank you for all the hard work!
Strawberry Salad Forever
Doesn't that look delicious?!
TNFP grown lettuce, local strawberries, donated feta and toasted almonds made for some beautiful salads this week. These salads will be included in 250 meals.
Starbucks in the Garden
What was Starbucks up to in the garden?
This awesome group of Starbucks managers volunteered at our Wedgewood Urban Gardens. Glad to see them still smiling after two hours of pulling weeds, prepping soil and laying irrigation lines. Must be all the caffeine. Thank you Starbucks for supporting our work!
Tomatoes Tomatoes!
Hmmm. Wonder if they planted enough?
These Harpeth Hall 8th graders planted the first 50 tomatoes of our summer tomato crop. We're excited about the San Marzano, Cherokee Purple, Black Krim, Tropic and Brandywine headed for our kitchens. Do you have a favorite heirloom tomato variety?
Growing Community
What have our community gardeners been up to?
Community gardeners at our Wedgewood Urban Gardens planted their summer crops recently. Everyone is eager for the first ripe tomatoes, peppers, green beans and more. What's the summer vegetable you've missed the most since last year?
Garden Beauties!
We're happy these two lovely ladies paused a moment from their work to have some fun for the camera. Stop by sometime to see what all their hard work has produced. Linda has outfitted our new herb dryer with shelves and Madi has filled the greenhouse with seedlings for our final Project Grow pick up this week.
Last summer, students from the Oasis Center worked in partnership with The Frist Center to make this beautiful art installation that hangs over the refugee toolshed at our Wedgewood Urban Gardens. Some of the students continue to volunteer weekly in the garden and are proud to show their artwork to their peers from the International Teen Outreach Program.
McGruder garden is ready for spring!
Thanks to these ladies for contributing their artwork to the McGruder Community Garden. This space is now truly full of life in many senses of the word!
Thanks to these students from Glencliff High School for volunteering in the garden. They worked hard to dig a new plot in the orchard, and the community gardeners have since planted it with potatoes!
After planting spring crops and working together to get seed potatoes in the ground, the McGruder Green Thumbers gathered around picnic tables to relax and enjoy a delicious lunch.
Herbs!
Thanks to the Herb Society of Nashville for donating herbs left over from their annual plant sale! We were able to share these herbs with the community gardeners we support at McGruder FRC, Wedgewood Urban Gardens and the Refugee Agriculture Program. For more about the herb society, visit their website here: http://www.herbsocietynashville.org
Welcome Bees!
We are so pleased to join the growing movement of urban beekeepers in Nashville and around the world. We welcomed three hives into our two urban gardens this spring...
A happy honeybee forages on a cover crop of crimson clover planted at our Wedgewood Urban Gardens.
Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower,
But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.
For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,
And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,
And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.
Kahlil Gibran, “On Pleasure”
We are so pleased to join the growing movement of urban beekeepers in Nashville and around the world. We welcomed three hives into our two urban gardens this spring and the tens of thousands of bees that now call TNFP home seem to be happily adjusting, building comb and foraging for nectar. Bees pollinate seventy percent of human food crops which supply about ninety percent of the world’s nutrition. While we hadn’t noticed that the wild bees in and around our gardens weren’t doing their job, we thought it was a good time to properly build a home for our own honeybee populations.
Two top bar hives installed at our Wedgewood Urban Gardens.
Humans and bees have co-evolved for millennia and at this point we pretty much can’t survive without each other - which isn’t to say that we aren’t trying. Many factors play into the honeybee colony collapses around the globe but almost all of them are related to human-caused environmental degradations. One of the best things we can do to help the bees (and therefore feed ourselves) is to increase the genetic diversity of the existing bee populations by promoting (and doing!) backyard beekeeping.
As is true of so many things related to our work, our bees would not have been able to call TNFP home without the hands of many wonderful volunteers and friends. We owe special thanks to Stephanie Weinzapfel, Jamie Huling, and Linda Bodfish in addition to many other folks who supported this project along the way. For a photo essay of the first weeks of beekeeping see below. For more information about bees, visit https://spikenardfarm.org. Drop in to see our bees anytime!
Ensworth School grows for our community
We love our partnership with Ensworth's 3rd grade classes. They purchase our seedlings through Project Grow, we help them plant their raised beds, and they donate the produce they harvest back to our kitchens. A pretty sweet deal on our end! We like to think they're gaining something as well: gardening skills and a fun, tangible way to give back to their community.
Turn, turn, turn
Feeling a little slouch after a long winter hibernation? Nothing gets the blood flowing like turning compost at our gardens. Come by anytime to see what's cooking in our compost pile!