Build It Up
Grow With Us
Build It Up provides organic gardening education from seed to harvest. Learn how to grow, prepare, and preserve food from your own backyard!
Applications for the 2025 program are now closed.
Our Programs
Since 2012, Build It Up has offered gardening education and installed over 200 new gardens in East Tennessee. We offer support to backyard gardeners, market gardeners, and school and community gardens.
Learn more about each service by clicking the links below.
Backyard Gardeners Program
We guide 30-40 families through a year of organic gardening education and support. Families receive plants, seeds, tools, fertilizer, and more to help grow healthy, fresh food right in their own backyards.
Market Gardeners Program
We foster entrepreneurship through agriculture and support market gardeners up to a half-acre in size.
Stay Connected through our YouTube Channel!
We post our workshops, informational videos and more to our YouTube channel. Check it out to learn more about some of the ways we choose to garden, equipment we prefer, and tips and tricks along the way!
Over 200 Families Served
Wish your kids knew where their food comes from? Gardening provides so many opportunities for kids (and adults!) to learn about food, nature, and the joy of dirt under your fingernails. Learn more about our Backyard Gardening Program:
Grow Organically
We teach how to grow organically and in harmony with our ecosystem. Our workshops focus on gardening in ways that prevent and disease issues naturally without relying on chemical fertilizers or sprays.
Pounds of Food Grown
%
Organic
Families
Latest from the blog:
We feature stories from our Build It Up participants as well as guides for when to be doing what in your garden like succession planting recommendations, seed starting, and more.
Xinyi Chen Lin: A Gardener’s Story
We’re now focusing on more pest-resilient crops like peppers, okra, tomatoes, onions, leeks, and plenty of culinary and medicinal herbs. We also planted eggplants, though flea beetles have already taken a toll—hopefully, the organic pesticide from the program helps them bounce back. Eggplants are especially valuable in our keto diet as excellent fat sponges.
Katie Williamson: Gardener’s Story
My garden is 30 feet by 60 feet and is situated on the only really flat part of my mountain property. I opted to till once because the rocky clay soil was so compacted. I then applied a layer of woodchips, leaves and compost and let that sit for a while.
Danielle Fagans: A gardener’s story
In the raised beds out back, we have two kinds of potatoes, basil, rosemary, tomatoes, sage, and bush beans. I’m trying to do more companion gardening this time around to hopefully limit the amount of “bad” pests and bring about the good ones that will for sure help our garden grow!
This whole experience has been life changing as it has truly brought our family closer together.
Special Thanks
Build It Up is one of many Grow Appalachia partner sites. Click below to learn more about Grow Appalachia and our sister programs.