This past August, we had our Celebrating Food Resiliency Potluck, hosted in collaboration with Oak Ridge Periodic Tables, at the Historic Grove theater on August 10th! It was a great time to come together and celebrate the successes of the season and try new meals. It’s always inspiring to see the seasonal dishes and delights made with vegetables straight from the garden. August activities have been creating and implementing a fall garden plan. Most of the fall crops in east TN had a recommended planting date of Sept. 1st, so our gardeners have been spending time sewing seeds for the fall season, while making decisions about what to keep and let go from their warm season gardens. 

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It has been exciting to watch our gardeners learn and grow this past season. During garden visits this past month, we have been reflecting on and celebrating our gardener’s stories and successes. Here are some of the highlights and stories from our gardeners! 

Sabrina and her family moved to Oak Ridge in 2018, and after working on the inside of their house for a few years, they were settled enough to start thinking about the outside. To Sabrina, it made sense to install a garden that you could also eat from. She decided to garden because she always liked the idea of growing things and after 2020, she just became more interested. Her interest and excitement in gardening continues to develop. Sabrina started gardening in 2021.The more she reads about and sees, just brings more excitement and play to her gardening practices. She appreciates the connection that gardening brings to the seasons and enjoys gardening with things that serve a purpose through companion planting.

Lately, sharing with her neighbors has made gardening even more exciting for her, as her garden provides food for the honeybee hives in one of her neighbor’s yard and she grows things that she can share with another neighbor’s chickens. Her favorite thing to grow are herbs because you can do so many things with them. Really pretty much anything in the garden is the coolest thing ever for her. The hardest thing for her to grow has been spinach. Her unexpected successes from this year have been in weed control and having volunteer plants as things self seed. 

Katherine dabbled in gardening as a child but officially started gardening within the last 7 months in the Grow Your Own program. She wanted to garden because it is something she has always been interested in doing. One of her friends found out about the program and encouraged her to apply so they could do the program together. Her favorite thing to grow has changed as things have come to ripen.

She has really enjoyed the black cherry tomatoes and basil, but the biquinho peppers have been a recent favorite. Her unexpected successes from this season would be the purple sweet potatoes that started growing in her compost pile. She’s very interested in what the harvest will be like from them.

Jessica has been gardening on and off since she was 18. She started gardening with flowers.  She loves sunflowers and when she was once living in an upstairs apartment, she taught herself to grow sunflowers in planter buckets on her apartment balcony and used the railings as a support to where her whole balcony looked like it was made of sunflowers. She thought if I can grow sunflowers up here, what else can I grow?!

Her favorite part about gardening is also when finding a rabbit munching on things. She loves to grow all kinds of things. Cucumbers might be her favorite because they just keep producing and she can make pickles with them. The hardest thing to grow for her was broccoli because it would not form a head. Her unexpected successes from this year’s harvest would be the tomatoes. These are the most tomatoes that she has ever gotten and she’s gotten to make a bunch of sauces with them.

When Michelle was little, she grew up around a garden and remembered stomping around through it and eating things. She began gardening in the last 7 months when she joined the Grow Your Own program. Michelle’s daughter began gardening with the hope that her kids would be inspired to as well. Although her grandkids weren’t inspired to garden, Michelle was because of her daughter. She thought that gardening would also be something that her and her daughter could do together since they were both interested in it. Her daughter inspired her to garden enough that she intentionally signed up for the Grow Your Own program to begin gardening on her own. For her, gardening isn’t just a fun hobby, but it is something else, because it’s been awesome for her to be able to grow fresh things and to eat healthy, organic produce. She loves taking the produce home and saying “I grew this,” and make things with it and give it to loved ones. She can’t have a garden at her house and would not be able to garden without the community garden.

Through working in the community garden, she has developed a love for the sense of community that also grows in the garden, the sharing and knowing someone else is going to enjoy fresh, organic produce. It is an act of love and giving in sharing knowledge and harvest. She is not really sure about what the hardest thing to grow is, but more that it is hard to know if you are doing everything right. Her bell peppers have been an unexpected success because they’ve been a real surprise. Her favorite thing to grow would have been peas, but the most exciting have been the bell peppers and carrots.

This is Constance’s first year of vegetable gardening, but she has been gardening with perennial flowers for about 2 or 3 years now. She wanted a veggie garden to live a more self-sustaining life. Gardening is a life skill she has always wanted but hasn’t pursued until now until she joined the Grow Your Own program.

Her favorite thing this year to grow are the peppers because some were given to her as a mystery bundle and it’s been fun for her to watch the mystery unfold of what they would be! The hardest thing to grow for her this year has been cucumbers. Her unexpected successes this year would be the basil because it has gotten so big that it has basically become a tree!

Jackie and Banks have been gardening for 6 months. Banks has wanted to garden for a while because growing up, his family had a large garden. Once Jackie and Banks moved to Oak Ridge, they had all this space in their yard and wanted to do something with it. The previous owners of their house had a garden, and Jackie wanted to continue that practice to keep some history of the land.

Potatoes were probably the hardest thing for them to grow this year. Bank’s garden favorites are the strawberries. Jackie likes okra because they produce a lot and the beauty that the flowers they planted this year have brought! 

Natalie has dabbled in gardening a couple times but this is the first year she has really gotten into it. At their last house, they gardened in soil that had been worked for more than 50 years by the previous homeowner. Their soil there was incredible and they could practically throw seeds out and things would grow. They established a new garden space at their new house and have done an incredible job amending the soil and adding organic material. Natalie got into gardening because last year she had health issues and started looking into her family’s food supply and ensuring that the food she was feeding her family was healthy, organic food.

Her favorite thing to grow have been cucumbers. They have treated them so well and have provided pounds of fresh cucumbers every day. The hardest thing for them to grow has been watermelons. Her unexpected garden successes from this year’s harvest have been tomatoes. They started out looking really pathetic and had to deal with hornworms and blossom end rot. They did not think they would get any tomatoes from them at all, but now they are inundated with tomatoes!

Meredith and David started gardening for real in the past couple of years. Meredith decided to garden on a whim because she saw an ad for the Grow Your Own program on Facebook, and thought “hey, we are in TN, we can grow.” David started gardening because Meredith wanted to. David now does vermicompost with worms and makes the soil for the containers that they grow in.

David’s favorite thing to grow are zucchinis because they grow quite easily and you don’t have to do much to them. Meredith’s favorite is the Lemon Sun patty pan squash because they were delicious! David thought the hardest thing to grow were beans because they recently didn’t have much luck with them but they have in the past. For Meredith, the hardest thing to grow were the tomatoes both this year and last year. They’ve had to deal with tomato plant diseases but they have developed excellent knowledge in disease maintenance.