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Gathering - Gleaning for good! And don't miss the Farm to Table Dinner!
Welcome back to The Gathering
What a couple of weeks it's been in Knoxville! As the roar of the engines from the Knoxville Nationals fades and the dust settles on one of our busiest weeks of the year, we know a lot of you are also juggling back to school activities, new schedules, and the general whirlwind that comes with this time of year. Take a breath — you've earned it.
As things start to quiet down, we hope you'll find a moment to slow down and recenter: nourishing your body with good, real food; nourishing your soul through connection. This issue is full of ways to do just that — from picking fruit off a neighbor's tree, to a night out celebrating our local harvest, to a simple recipe that can bring your family back to the table as fall routines settle in.
Welcome back to The Gathering. We're glad you're here.
Practice | What we are growing and learning
What is gleaning?
Gleaning is an old practice with a simple heart: gathering up the fruit, vegetables, or grain that would otherwise go unused — whether it's dropping from a backyard tree no one has time to pick, or left in a field after harvest — and putting it to good use in the community. This fall, we're bringing gleaning to Knoxville, and we need your help to get it off the ground. We will start small this year and see if we can’t make it bigger next year!
What problem are we solving?
Every year, pounds of perfectly good fruit fall to the ground in yards across our community — apples, pears, and more that nobody gets around to picking. At the same time, plenty of families in our community are looking for accessible, affordable, nourishing food. Gleaning connects those two dots. It's a chance to:
Get good food into the hands of people who need it
Keep fruit from going to waste
Give volunteers a hands-on way to invest in their community
Chip away at a real cost problem: because our food system subsidizes large-scale mass production, locally grown, chemical-free food often carries a higher price tag — out of reach for some family budgets. Gleaning helps lower the cost of some items so families can stretch their dollars toward other local foods too.
How will it work?
Let us know about a tree. Have a fruit tree you can't keep up with, or don't have time to harvest? Tell us about it.
We'll assess and set a time. We'll come take a look and coordinate a pick date that works for you.
Volunteers join our on-call list. Sign up here to join our volunteer list — we'll reach out when fruit ripens and we need a picking crew.
Fruit gets picked and stored. Gleaned fruit goes into our refrigerators at MNM.
Fruit is shared back with the community. Available by free-will donation at Gathered Market, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 4–6pm, while supplies last.
What can you do with apples (or other gleaned fruit)?
Not sure what to do with a bumper crop of apples? A few ideas:
Peel and freeze as-is for baking and cooking later
Quick breads
Pie filling — freeze or can it now, bake later
Applesauce
Apple butter — this easy crockpot method makes it nearly hands-off and ready for toast the next morning.
What do we need from you?
This program runs on community. Here's how you can pitch in:
Volunteers to help pick fruit when it's ready
Apple pickers (the pole kind!) or baskets you're willing to lend or donate
Apple peeler/corers you're not using anymore — we'd love to add them to our lending library
Donations of freezer bags, canning jars, or pie tins to help fruit make its way into kitchens
Got a tree, a Saturday morning, or a peeler gathering dust in a drawer? Visit mintnmore.org/gleaningprogram to let us know about a tree or join the volunteer list.
Gather | Community in Action
Recapping the Herbal Tea Party
Last week we gathered for an Herbal Tea Party, where participants learned about the different herbs from the garden that can be used to make tea — and even more, enjoyed connecting with fellow herb-lovers over a shared interest in using garden harvests this way. We're already looking forward to future events where we can go deeper into the medicinal properties of herbs and plants!
Thank you to everyone who came out and made it such a lovely evening!
Save Your Seat: Farm to Table Dinner is August 22
The Second Annual Farm to Table Dinner is just around the corner, and this is your reminder to grab tickets before they're gone.
Held at Countryside Wedding & Events in Attica, this is a night built entirely around what our region can grow, raise, and make. Every course on the menu comes from farmers and suppliers right here in our state:
Welcome: A fresh fruit spritzer, mini loaves with local honey and jams, and homemade popcorn to start the evening
First course: A charcuterie board featuring honey-glazed acorn squash, chevre, and cranberry glaze
Second course: A mixed green salad with lemon vinaigrette
Third course: Your choice of grilled steak strips or herb butter chicken, served with roasted potatoes and farm veggies
Dessert: A triple-layer carrot-zucchini-beet cake with cream cheese frosting and corn ice cream
Every ingredient traces back to a name and a farm — from Shafer Apiary's honey to Blue Gate Farm's greens and potatoes, Northcote Meats, Pierce's Pumpkin Patch, Irm's Bakery, and more. It's all brought together by Jonith VanWardhuizen and the team at Hometown Market and Deli.
This is more than a meal — it's a chance to taste what our local food system is capable of, spend a great evening out close to home, and celebrate the season's bounty alongside your neighbors.
Tickets are $95 and available now on the MNM website or in person at Hometown Meats in Knoxville. Seats are limited, so don't wait to grab yours.
Take Root | Your Next Step
Photos by Francesco Tonelli for The New York Times
Ratatouille: A Fancy Name for a Simple Garden Staple
Say "ratatouille" (ra-tah-too-ee) out loud and it sounds like something only a French chef (or a very talented cartoon rat) could pull off. But strip away the fancy name, and what you've really got is a humble stewed vegetable dish — the kind of meal home cooks across rural France have been throwing together for generations using whatever the garden gave them that week. That's exactly the spirit we want to bring into your kitchen this season.
Why now? Late summer is peak ratatouille season. Eggplant, zucchini, summer squash, peppers, tomatoes — all the vegetables filling up garden beds and market tables right now are the very ones this dish is built around. It's a one-pot way to use up abundance instead of letting it linger in the crisper drawer.
Why this recipe, and why now for you? If you're a hesitant or beginner cook, ratatouille is a forgiving place to start. There's no precise technique to master — just vegetables, olive oil, garlic, herbs, and time. Chop, stir, simmer. It's hard to mess up, and it tastes like you tried a lot harder than you did.
We also love this recipe for another reason: as routines shift with back-to-school season, mealtime becomes one of the steadiest ways to reconnect as a family. Think of fall as a bit of a "new year" — a natural moment to build new habits and rituals. A simple, cook-together dinner like this one is an easy way to bring everyone back to the table as schedules change, and to make "trying something new" part of how your family marks the season.
Get the full recipe here: How to Make Ratatouille (NYT Cooking)
The best part? You can find nearly everything you need for this dish right here at home. Shop our convenient Gathered Local Foods Market for garden-fresh eggplant, zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, and herbs — all grown by local farmers, so your ratatouille pot is truly a taste of our community's harvest.
Give it a try this week. Gather the family, gather the vegetables, and gather around the table.
Rooted Reflection
In permaculture, there's a principle often summed up as "the edge is where the action is" — the margins, the overlooked in-between spaces, tend to be some of the most productive and diverse places in a whole system. A forest's edge holds more life than either the open field or the deep woods alone. A hedgerow does more work than a bare fence line. The margins aren't waste space — they're often where the richest opportunity is hiding, if we take the time to notice it.
Our gleaning program is really just this principle applied to community. That apple tree in the corner of your yard that drops more fruit than any one household could ever use isn't a nuisance to rake up — it's an edge, quietly producing abundance that's gone unnoticed and unused.
This week, we invite you to sit with a simple question:
What's growing in the margins around you — something going unused — that could be of real value to your neighbors, your friends, your community?
Maybe it's literal: a tree, a garden bed that's overproduced, a patch of land not being tended. Maybe it's less literal: an hour of free time, a skill you don't often think to share, a relationship you haven't leaned into. Like the edges in a healthy ecosystem, the overlooked spaces in our own lives are often where the most good is waiting to happen — we just have to notice them, and be willing to share what we find there.
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