The Nashville Food Project’s Blog
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!
KLD Farm
Looking for local responsibly-raisedmeat? Check out this farmer.
Lucy and Ken Drinnon with Tallu at their gorgeous KLD Farm in Ashland City. They donated almost 200 pounds of beef and pork to our Meals program last week. KLD raises happy, healthy animals on plenty of green pasture. Visit Ken on Saturdays at the Nashville Farmer's Market and purchase their delicious and responsibly-raised meat. We love these dear people!
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?
Bring on the pie!
We served how much pot pie???
Pot pie that is. We served over a thousand servings of chicken pot pie last week. That means cook teams rolled and baked homemade biscuits to top each serving. This entree came alongside roasted sweet potatoes, garden salad and a Christie Cookie! This is food we are very proud to share in our community. We'd love to have you spend time in our kitchen helping prepare delicious meals. Check out our volunteer opportunities HERE.
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?
Good Enough to Eat!
What a unique way to learn about fruits and vegetables!
Learning while using these beautiful handmade fruits and vegetables certainly make us want to eat the real thing!
We could not be more thrilled with the latest art project that students at Ensworth High School have completed for us. We now have two full binders of incredibly detailed felted vegetables to use in our educational 'nutrition rainbow' activities with youth and for ESL support with the refugee community gardeners with whom we work. We so appreciate their creativity!
The Urban Gardening Festival is Saturday
Come visit our booth at the Urban Gardening Festival and learn how easy - and helpful - it is to make soil blocks to start your seeds.
Come visit with us this Saturday, May 16, from 9am-4pm at The Urban Gardening Festival on the campus of Ellington Agricultural Center, 5201 Marchand Dr, Nashville, TN 37211. We'll be there demonstrating our soil block technique for starting seeds. This free event is designed to educate and engage visitors with local artisans, exhibitors, gardeners and vendors from throughout the Greater Nashville area. There's so much to learn and experience - plan to spend a fun day!
Dollar General gets cooking!
This great group of folks from Dollar General spent a recent morning in our prep room working on potatoes and veggies for one of our favorite meals - shepherd's pie. Finished with a sprinkle of freshly grown TNFP parsley, this hearty meal served 75 residents at Mercury Courts. Great Job Dollar General!
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.
It's here!
We are so excited to have this new walk-in freezer installed behind our office! Just in time for freezing the abundance of summer crops that come our way. A huge thank you to Judy Wright and Christ Church Cathedral for making it happen!
Cake Mix to Cookies!
We've discovered a delicious way to prepare both almond and lemon cookies from a yellow cake mix. Thank you Anne Byrn AKA "The Cake Mix Doctor" for sharing your excess cake mixes with us!
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.
Turkey (and chicken) pickers!
Here's the best turkey pickin' group in Nashville! Almost 100 pounds of turkeys & chickens were turned into pot pies made with a a rich, homemade broth and lots of fresh vegetables. Our office smelled like grandma's house for days!
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!
Granola Truffles
This is the result of some creative work in our prep room. Remember our granola bar recipe...
This is the result of some creative work in our prep room. Remember our granola bar recipe from a couple weeks ago? We made a batch that came out a little too soft to cut and serve. Our meal prep volunteers put their heads together and decided to turn them into "truffles" by rolling them in crushed vanilla wafers. Voila! Instant perfect snack. We love the creativeness of our volunteers!!
Generosity!
This guy! Continued thanks to John Patrick of Foggy Hollow Farm who dropped off 30 dozen certified organic eggs for us to use in our meals. John is building a sustainable poultry network in our community and his enthusiasm for chickens is contagious! You can purchase his eggs, meat and chickens. Learn more at foggyhollowfarm.net
New meal prep times
Let's get chopping!
We are excited to begin a new partnership with the United Way’s SPARK program whose mission is to engage youth in consistent, structured physical activity; to promote movement; to advocate basic nutrition through education; and to provide accessible, cost-effective meals for the entire family two times a week. We are providing 36 families at both the Salvation Army and Bethlehem Center with two healthy meals per week. With this expansion of our meal program, we have added additional prep times and are looking for volunteers.
Two new prep times are available on Saturdays for 10 volunteers each session: 10am-12pm and 1-3pm. Monday prep is from 10am-12pm and Wednesday evening prep is from 5:30-7:30pm. Ready to get chopping? Sign up here. If you are interested in scheduling a group of 4-10 volunteers for a meal prep activity, contact Malinda at malinda@thenashvillefoodproject.org.