The Month in Review
January, 2025
The month of January was comparatively busy for our food forest and community gardening work, despite the fact that, for a few weeks at least, we had genuine winter cold, accompanied in my case at least by bouts of sickness. Part of that time has been spent in meetings and planning sessions, as we continue to lay and build out the social and relational groundwork necessary to get things going and to ensure their longer-term stability. I’ll touch on a couple of these instances of relationship building shortly, but there are many others going on “behind the scenes” that hopefully in time will be more publicly manifest. There are a lot of people and organizations, big and small, around Chattanooga working towards common goals that align with our vision and work, and making sure that we’re all more or less on the same page and are moving resources, marshaling people, and making use of land in ways that mutually benefit us all is a constant task—the problem of coordination and communication is a good one to have to be sure!
Towards the end of connecting people and organizations we held our first community luncheon in the middle of January, gathering a wide range of people at Emma Wheeler Homes for lunch (sponsored by our partners at Thrivent Financial Services, shout out to them for their continuing vital support!) and discussion; afterwards folks were able to have a look at the community garden and food forest plantings underway there (and stay tuned, something big is coming down the road in February at that site!). Also in January we held our first environmental history reading group at And Then Books in Rossville; it was a blast, if I do say so myself—we enjoyed delicious food brought by several participants and vigorous and insightful discussion of some very big topics. If you missed out on last month’s, we’ll be meeting this month on the 6th, details here, with more sessions to come.
We also had a well-attended and very productive volunteer work day on January 21st at the ELLA Community Library, building a set of recycled pallet garden fences that will help to mark off our growing space from the central area that doubles as a soccer “field” and basketball court, balls going wide of the goals previously threatening plants in the beds behind. I’m happy to report that the kids who use the library have already adapted the pallet fence to new ends, constructing a fort in a couple of the bays on one side. We also have begun expanding the garden beds there, the kids planting spinach and pea seeds earlier this week (now that the weather isn’t just spring like but bordering on early summer almost).
One of the newer relationships we’ve established is with the Westside Community Garden and Greenhouse, a venerable institution in Chattanooga’s community agriculture landscape. We’ll be hosting volunteer work days later in the year there to help renovate the infrastructure some and build out the gardener base; in the meantime, our friends at ReConnect Nature School have started volunteering periodically there, helping with greenhouse work (which will go towards supplying various community gardens around town with plants) and general cleanup.
Things that are coming up in the weeks ahead: on February 15th there will be a volunteer orientation day for sites in the St. Elmo neighborhood (we’re up to three now)—this will be especially helpful for anyone who would like to get involved on a regular basis at one or all of these neighborhood sites, in whatever capacity. We need folks who can plant, manage trees, water, pull weeds (strategically!), and so forth, as well as individuals or groups of people who would like to take more of a leadership and planning role.
We’ll also be hosting volunteer work days at Emma Wheeler on February 22, Tennessee Tree Day sites on March 15, and will have tree planting and other opportunities coming up elsewhere—our Instagram account is the best place to stay regularly updated. If you’d like to get involved at individual sites (review the list here) please get in touched with me or with individual site stewards. And if you have spare wood that could work for garden beds, concrete blocks, old bricks, or even rocks that would be useful in bed demarcation, or any other raw materials you think might be useful, get in touch and we can arrange to get them to where they are needed. Finally, one of our goals for this year is to build out the sign infrastructure at all of our sites, so if are handy at woodworking and are looking for a new project, give us a shout!