This week’s good news came in three sizes that had nothing in common on the surface: 200,000 square feet of warehouse breaking ground in Nashville, 1,000 small flags going into the ground in Hermitage, and two seeds pulled from a fast-food tomato slice. But look closer and it’s the same instinct wearing different clothes — people deciding to build something, remember someone, or just see what happens if you try.
A Much Bigger Kitchen for a Hungry Region
Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee broke ground this week on a new 23-acre campus at 1301 Donelson Pike in Nashville — a facility built to more than double what the organization can rescue and distribute across its 46-county reach, a region where nearly 500,000 people don’t have reliable access to food, including 1 in 7 adults and 1 in 5 children.
“Today’s groundbreaking is about far more than a building,” said Nancy Keil, the organization’s president and CEO. “It represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine how we serve our neighbors.”
The new campus folds a lot of separate work into one address: a 200,000-square-foot warehouse, a first-of-its-kind on-site pantry called the Neighbor Market where families choose food based on their own dietary needs, and a Culinary Center that trains people in cooking while also prepping meals for disaster response. More than 20 nonprofit partners will work out of the same building, connecting visitors to housing help, healthcare, and job prep without a second stop.
The volunteer side is scaling up too. A new 15,000-square-foot training and sorting space is expected to push volunteer hours from about 84,500 last year toward more than 125,000 annually — tens of thousands more hands sorting and packing food for neighbors they’ll likely never meet.
The project was made possible by a list of funders that includes the Frist Foundation, Starbucks, Amazon, the Bill & Crissy Haslam Foundation, and the HCA Healthcare Foundation, among others. None of it fills a pantry shelf today. But it’s the difference between an organization straining against its own walls and one built to actually meet the need in front of it.
Read the full story at Rutherford Source.
A Field Planted With Remembrance
Near Hermitage Presbyterian Church, the Exchange Club of Donelson-Hermitage is putting 1,000 American flags into the ground for the 11th year running — a display called the Field of Honor, built in partnership with the Colonial Flag Foundation.
The flags go up November 5–14, with a dedication ceremony on Friday, November 6 at 2 p.m. featuring Colonel Donny W. Hebel of the Tennessee National Guard, and a closing ceremony on Saturday, November 14 at 10 a.m. Both are open to the public, and the field itself is open for viewing November 9–13 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Each flag can be purchased or sponsored, and the money raised goes to organizations that work directly with veterans and military families — the Gary Sinise Foundation, REBOOT Combat Recovery, The Family Center, Youth Villages, Nashville USO, and Volunteers of America–Veteran Services.
Sponsors can pick up their flags after the closing ceremony; anything left uncollected will wait at Pinnacle Financial Partners on Donelson Pike through December 4. A field of a thousand small flags isn’t a grand gesture on its own — it’s a thousand small ones, each one somebody’s choice to remember a person by name.
Read the full story at Rutherford Source.
The Tomato That Started as a Burger
YouTube gardener James Prigioni wanted to know if a tomato slice from a Quarter Pounder could actually become a tomato plant. He pulled two seeds from one slice, cleaned them on a paper towel, and planted a whole slice from a second burger as a separate test. Both sprouted in soil-filled Solo cups within about a week.
He raised one seedling in the ground and one in a 5-gallon bucket, pinching off blighted leaves and staking the plants as they grew. Three months later, the in-ground plant was carrying so much fruit that Prigioni said he was “completely blown away” — more tomatoes on one plant, he said, than he’d ever grown before. The bucket plant, stressed by uneven watering, produced less but ripened faster.
The fruit turned out to be a Roma type, sweet and good-tasting, likely a hybrid — which means seeds saved from these particular tomatoes probably won’t grow the same way twice. A tiny, deliberately silly experiment, and still: proof that most living things are trying to grow, given almost any chance at all.
Read the full story at Upworthy.
A food bank big enough to meet the need in front of it, a field planted so no one is forgotten, a tomato plant that grew more than anyone expected it to — none of it required much more than someone deciding to try. If something is going right in your corner of the Boro, we’d like to hear about it.