The 2022 Growing Together harvest season is kicking off! With CSAs and produce shares about to begin, it is important for our community to know the farmers who grow their food. Lal Subba, Chandra and Tonka Poudel, Sumitra and Pabitra Guragai, Nar and Tek Guragai, and La Sa Roi all steward plots at our Growing Together farm, and their personalities are each as vibrant as their veggies.

The Growing Together program is small, but its impact is deep. This year, there were six families farming our one acre of land. More than 20,000 pounds of vegetables were harvested from this green and compact corner of our city. More than 5,000 pounds of that were purchased by The Nashville Food Project from the farmers and then shared with partners and community members who helped distribute to those who otherwise lack access to fresh produce. We are also grateful for the customers who participated in our community supported agriculture (CSA) program. In this post, we share a few favorite moments of the year.

Growing Together Manager Tallahassee May writes about the farmers’ produce-sharing partnership with Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition.

“In growing food for local sales and distribution, [the farmers] have the autonomy to grow food that is both culturally meaningful to them as well as crops that support relationship-building with different cultures.”

The Nashville Food Project garden spaces have long been witness to the wisdom, hope and joy of growers who came to the United States from Southeast Asia. We also have been witness to their added hardships and concerns this past year including anti-Asian violence here. and abroad.

Director of Garden Programs Lauren Bailey writes about the countless and often unseen hands in our food system. She challenges us to consider the larger web we exist in by acknowledging and learning from food workers as we work toward a better food system.

We love collaborating with and supporting the vibrant, creative work of community building-organizations in our city. And this fall, we have been especially pleased to work with Trap Garden. Farmers from the Growing Together program have been providing vegetables through Trap Garden and Preston Taylor Ministries.

As a people of fierce hope that believe in intersectionality and interdependence, we’ve also seen generous creativity implemented to help neighbors care for each other. We found this type of resistant and persistent care in the work and community fostered by Legacy Mission Village.

So many doors, businesses, and communities are closed and we are all feeling the impact and the collective suffering. And yet. We at the Nashville Food Project and within the Growing Together community have no choice but to use this as an opportunity to imagine, envision, and create new doors, new opportunities, and new pathways forward. We will continue on with our vision of community food security, where everyone has access to the food they want and need.

Since gardeners and farmers growing in many spaces can utilize and benefit from starting seeds indoors, we thought we’d share some of the tips and tricks the Growing Together farmers and staff of The Nashville Food Project use to grow the healthiest transplants!

Just as a garden feels constantly in motion, so too is the Growing Together program itself evolving and growing. This year our program has exciting news to share -- the Growing Together farmers will be growing for a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program for the first time!

Though the days are short and the winter air is cold, TNFP garden participants are busy planning and training for the season ahead. Regular garden trainings with our Community Garden and Growing Together programs provides space for learning and knowledge-sharing.

We often say that food has the power to transform lives, and we see this so clearly in our Growing Together program. Growing Together is The Nashville Food Project’s agricultural micro-enterprise training program. Through it, we work to expand farming access and opportunity to a group of growers who are originally from Burma and Bhutan.

On an unseasonably hot and sunny day in April, I stand in the aisle between two newly shaped beds of a Growing Together farmer. We’ve been spending the last two weeks attempting to till the soil, but have been successfully thwarted by erratic weather that left the earth too wet to till…

It’s a warm day in early October at the Nashville Farmer’s Market, I’m sitting at our table, assisting customers and rearranging the produce as the hours pass. The crowd has just picked up, and I observe some curious onlookers eye the assortment of unique vegetables on our table: from spikey bitter gourds to long, curling beans…

Wwhen we asked the farmers of Growing Together what to do with tomatoes for sampling at the Nashville Farmers’ Market, they suggested achaar — a tomato-based chutney popular in Bhutanese and Nepali cuisine…