Build It Up Blog
The Build It Up Blog includes entries from our gardners discussing their gardening journey and guides from our program staff regarding when to start your seeds, when to put transplants in the ground, when to fertilize, and more!
Gardener Story: Grace Edwards
My great joy in my garden, this year, has been the involvement of my youngest kiddo. Gardening with my three-year-old daughter amidst the challenges of deer nibbling and imperfect planting conditions has provided a valuable and enriching experience for her development...
Gardener Story: Lucas Family
When we set out on this journey, our goal was to grow as much of our own food as we could and preserve it to use during the winter months. We’ve had successes and failures alike. We are still relatively new to Tennessee and it’s climate. We come from a hot dry...
Gardener Story: Underwood Family
Why did this happen? We were not able to grow anything in Florida, where we lived for 19 years. Nor would we have known what to grow or had much room to grow it. As soon as we moved here, we began thinking of what to do with our land instead of having a big yard to...
Field Notes from The Modern Farmstead
Greetings from our humble garden. It’s early July as I write this and the plants seems to double in size after every good rain. I’m eyeing the hundreds of swelling green tomatoes and I know that life is about to get really busy in the kitchen. We’ve been toiling away...
Gardener Story: Wight Family Garden
I started gardening out of the need for more fresh foods for my children due to food allergies and sensitivities. This was the push I needed as I’ve wanted to garden since I was a child watching my Aunt put out a big garden every year. I want to create my own...
Gardner Story: Jill Caron
We moved to the Telford area in Sept. 2019 from SE NC. We tried growing tomatoes and squash the first couple of years here with moderate success. I established raspberries in 2020 and they do well and flourish with little help. I felt at a loss as to what would grow...
Gardener Story: Lisa Scholz
This is the second year that we have had a garden here in Tennessee. We are transplants from New York and had a very teeny tiny garden up there for the last few years before we moved. We were always more or less just experimenting to see if we could grow food. Our...
Gardener Story: Smith Family
The adventure of growing food for our family has been a passion of ours for a lot of years now. Every year it seems that we have new motivations and new goals to expand in various ways. This year, along with growing our usual staple crops, we have incorporated some...
Gardener Story: Pietrowski Family
During my childhood, my parents always tried to have a very small garden, but we never seemed to have the time or the ability to expand beyond tomatoes, cucumbers, and green peppers. Once or twice, they ventured into melons and pumpkins, but we weren’t very...