In our crane-filled city, where the skyline is altering before our eyes, it’s heartening to know that four miles from the urban core is an historic 64-acre farm, protected by the Land Trust for Tennessee.
Heather Hauser
Sarah Bush
Since 2008, The Hermitage Hotel has had a special relationship with the Land Trust, renting two of those acres to sustainably grow produce for use in its kitchen. Since January 2019, farmer Sarah Bush took over that stewardship, working closely with executive chef Derek Brooks and his team to cultivate a spectacular array of organic herbs, flowers, and heirloom vegetables.
Originally from Kingston Springs, Bush came to farming in a roundabout way. Schooled in East Tennessee in art and history, she went to work at Blackberry Farm as a floral designer, event planner, and stylist. As that farm transitioned to farmstead status, she began to recognize that she was happiest when working in the gardens and fields. This propelled her on a journey across the country to learn farming ways. In 2009, she founded a teaching garden at Bonnaroo, which she continued to nurture in 2010. (She revisited it this past July; it’s still going strong.) She tended a production garden for three seasons at a wilderness lodge in Alaska. Then, she apprenticed at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems in Santa Cruz, California, followed by a two-year advanced apprenticeship at Quail Hill Farm on Long Island’s east end.
Bush beams when she recalls her time at Quail Hill.
Heather Hauser
Sarah Bush
“I love that community,” she says. “I learned how to operate tractors. I embraced the traditions of group singing as we farmed. [It was] a life-changing experience.”
After so many years away, Bush returned home in 2018 and soon learned about the open position at Glen Leven.
“My dream job!” she exclaims. “After learning how to farm in three very different climates, it’s been fascinating to come back and relearn what it’s like to farm here, especially with the challenge of climate change.”
Tour the Glen Leven Garden with Bush and she’ll proudly show a circa-1960 International Harvester 140 tractor—ideal for a small-scale farmer. She prizes it for its special metal shoes that calibrate rows and its offset seat. She’s also relieved at the recent installation of the permanent deer fence, an eight-foot black metal mesh that recedes into the background and all but disappears.
“The deer quickly figured it out and moved on,” she says.
The field is divided into nine plots. Three are in active cultivation, with sections dedicated to perennial and annual herbs and flowers, nightshades (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, potatoes and ground cherries), and assorted greens. She’s allowing the lettuces to go to seed, so she can collect them for the next crop. Bush believes in intensive farming and companion planting. Honoring the Chickasaw and Shawnee tribes who originally lived here, she’s growing a long row of Three Sisters: corn, squashes, and beans, their vines using the cornstalks as a trellis. “The beans really help fix nitrogen into the soil.”
Heather Hauser
Six plots are in varying stages of soil remediation. One planted in a cover crop by the previous farmer, she discovered, was not rye, but wheat—unusual for this area. She’s been gleefully hand-harvesting it with a knife, threshing the stalks and amassing the wheatberries. She’ll set aside part of the harvest for milling into flour and the rest for the chefs to make whole-grain salads.
Working with the Hermitage Hotel chefs, Bush has created a spreadsheet of crops—their variety, plant date, and harvest date with a place for notes about each one. The chefs practice no waste, and send Bush six to eight five-gallon buckets of rescued scraps for compost each week. These days, she’s been picking squash blossoms off of the volunteer plants running amok on the heap; the chefs have been using them in a luscious pesto with herbs and goat cheese to fold throughout pasta.
Bush finds a harmony in the land and the people it feeds. Beyond her work for the hotel, she wants to share the transformative power of community singing in connection with farming.
“My goal is to introduce women in food to the healing magic of soil and song,” she says, “because kitchens, restaurants, and farms are spaces where our voices are often marginalized.”