Demos
About Us
Gardening isn't an all or nothing venture. You can have a garden that is 20% efficient in using the available space to grow as many calories as possible and you can be at 50% or 80% efficient and there will be food grown. You will never reach 100% efficiency in your garden so there is always room to grow, experiment, streamline, and fit more production into your garden. When you donate to Roots Ministries, you are not only helping us buy the tools, seeds, and plants to continue the work in our garden, but you are also helping us buy the materials to get other people gardening. We want to deploy gardens at churches, nonprofits, schools, and in backyards all over Nashville and the world. When we have money on hand, we accelerate what we do. 0% of our donations go to staff at this moment. Everything goes to growing more food.
Totally! There are many opportunities for groups of all sizes. If you want to schedule a time for your group to come help in the garden during the week email nate@rootsministries.org. If you want to get into a weekly routine with the garden, we meet every Saturday from 9-Noon in the months of May-October as long as there's not inclement weather. We are currently looking for people to specialize in different plants. For example: We need a tomato specialist who knows how to weed, water, sucker, prune, trellis, harvest, wash, and weigh tomatoes. We want to train people to become experts in one plant instead of trying to master the whole garden all at once. If you want to stay in the loop please sign up for our Garden GroupMe: here.
Yes! There are so many simple ways to get involved and we are here to educate! One rule we have in the garden is "Never garden alone" and if you let us know you're coming, we will make sure that Nate or someone else on the team will be other there with you.
If there is a parent or guardian present, we have no minimum age. We are happy to have all ages in the garden, working, serving, growing, and learning together.
We start hyper local at the church and resource center next door to the garden and once we saturate our local system we distribute further out into Madison and greater Nashville. On Saturdays we pick, wash, weigh, and stage the produce at our "pay what you can" stand in the lobby of Madison Church of Christ. Anything not used on Sunday morning goes to the Meals on Wheels kitchen at the resource center or given out to those in the community who come for assistance from 8:30-11:30 Monday-Friday. We then offer the produce to "The Beat" that uses the resource center to do a weekly meal for those living on the street. And if we still have more to share we will call The Nashville Food Project and The Society of St. Andrews gleaning program. Once we start to saturate all of these avenues, we hope to start having harvest meals in the garden to spend more time together and thank God for everything he has given us.
Absolutely not! Here are several reasons why. We only keep hens in our garden and they only care about sleeping, eating, dust bathing, and laying eggs. We do not have any roosters. Roosters are focused on guarding the hens from danger and finding food for the hens. If a rooster preceives that you are trying to hurt a hen, he might get aggressive, but we have no roosters. Chickens don't have teeth. Hens are more scared of you than you are of them. We also typically keep our chickens in grazing paddocks that are fenced off. So you never have to be inside the chicken paddock if you don't want to be.
Yes, on our donations web page, you can schedule an ongoing monthly or yearly gift and you can also email nate@rootsministries.org if you want to give directly to a project or tool that we are trying to save up for.
Absolutely! If you have too much squash or okra coming out of your ears, you are always welcome to add your produce in with our deliveries. If you have plants you want to split or seeds you want to share, we'd be happy to give them a place to grow. We love to collaborate and share, so just let us know what you have and we will see how we can work together.
