rural resources

Farm Arts Festival October 10, 2009

2009-10-01T19:00:00.000-07:00

The 2009 Farm Arts Festival will be Saturday, October 10, 2009, at Rural Resources' Holley Creek Farm, 2870 Holley Creek Road. The festival will run from noon till 6:00 p.m.

Guests will delight in lots of live music and story telling with Joyce Carroll, JB and the Honeybeans, Richard Spain, The Bearded, Ras Alan, Oona Love and Friends, and Sonja and her youth dance team while enjoying food cooked by at risk teens involved in Rural Resources' Farm and Food Training Project. The food comes from local farms, and will be made by the teens with supervision from local chef Mary Goldman.

There will also be demonstrations throughout the day on wool spinning, planting by the signs, fruit tree pruning, stock dog herding, dividing perennials, processing jellies and jams, herbs used in cooking and for medicine, bamboo instruments, and organic gardening.

The kids will enjoy games to celebrate our fall harvest with face painting, pumpkin toss, pin the tail on the cow, hay ride, painting pumpkins, and a petting zoo with a variety of farm animals including a couple of baby calves.

The Farm Arts Festival is sponsored by the USDA Community Food Project, East Tennessee Foundation Arts Fund, and The Tennessee Arts Commission.

Volunteers Help with Fire Cleanup

2009-04-20T07:55:00.000-07:00

The first part of last week was pretty grim and dismal. Most of the staff worked from their homes, trying to help in whatever way possible to keep up with ongoing activities and programs. Those that came to the farm to work were faced with cramped quarters in the make-shift office in the chicken shed, an ever present view of the leftover charred rubble, and chilly, gray, cloudy days.

On Thursday, however, the sun was shining, the birds were singing, and there were new faces showing up at the farm to help with cleanup! The volunteers rolled up their sleeves, put on their gloves, grabbed shovels, donned hard-hats, and jumped right into whatever mess we asked them to work on. We also had weed pullers, wheelbarrow pushers, organizers, sorters, scrubbers, and rakers. Robin Fife's Service Learning class from Tusculum College spent a half day with us, working hard on cleanup, and community members Dorothy Hall and Jody Fagundes devoted their time to our cleanup efforts as well. We are so grateful for these volunteers!

The energy and hope of the staff was renewed by the willingness and hard work of the volunteers. With their help, we were able to get a huge amount of work accomplished. We are very thankful to them, not only for their physical help, but also for the company, the conversation, and the smiles; the lifting of spirits, the easing of a burden!

Rural Resources' Good Friday Fire

2009-04-15T11:34:00.000-07:00

On April 10, Good Friday, the building housing Rural Resources' offices, kitchen, restroom, craft supplies, seeds, container garden supplies, important files, archives, computers, phones, and fifteen years' worth of memories, memorabilia, and hard work was destroyed in a fire.

While the building and its contents were a near-total loss (some important computer files were rescued from the main hard drive), we are thankful that no people or animals were lost or injured.

You can read newspaper coverage of the fire here, here, and here.

We plan to continue our work in the community in spite of our losses, but we need your help! If you have ideas about how you can help us rebuild, if you can help with cleanup, or if you have goods or services to donate, please contact Rural Resources at (423) 636-8171, or email info@ruralresources.net.

Our wish list is posted on the right hand side of our blog for your reference. If you wish to make a monetary donation to be used for fire recovery, please write a check payable to Rural Resources, or visit a Greene Bank, where a fire account has been set up in our name.

We thank all of those in our community who have already been of great help, as well as those who will help us in the near future, and we continue to see this loss as an opportunity for growth!

Something New

2009-01-19T18:34:00.000-08:00

This blog is an experiment for Rural Resources. Right now it's being tested by our school garden coordinator, Amanda. If we can keep the blog up consistently, we'll be thrilled to provide an arena for feedback from our community.

Right now at Rural Resources, our teens are setting up business plans for the spring. One group will be growing plants that will be used in container gardens that we'll distribute in the spring, hopefully in our amazing farm truck!

We're also hard at work planning for our 2009 Farm Arts Festival, which will be held in October (hard to believe we're planning it already!), as well as a teacher inservice this spring to provide support for teachers who are planning for or using school gardens.

Even in the winter months, we're "growing" at Rural Resources!