There are currently at least 12 community gardens in Ventura County, scattered from Simi Valley to Ojai—14, if you count two in Ojai no longer used for food but that are taken care of by the Ojai Valley Green Coalition.
Why the popularity?
A community garden offers a place for neighbors to grow healthy organic produce, but food is not the only thing growing at the garden. Community gardeners are a network of optimistic individuals from different backgrounds and beliefs coming together for a common goal: building community and bonds through a shared love of digging in the dirt. They work together, celebrate together, grieve together and reach out to their local communities.
For the past four years, I’ve had the pleasure of running a community garden and seeing first-hand the personal connections made between gardeners, gardens and their local communities. Since moving to Ventura County, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to get acquainted with several remarkable community gardens.
One of the longest-running community gardens is the city-run Cornucopia Community Garden in Ventura. It opened in 1984 and currently boasts 147 gardening plots. As I walked around them, I could see a variety of vegetables ready for harvest: from leafy greens like kale and chard to root vegetables like radishes, carrots and beets. It was evident that this community loves gardening.
When I asked about the importance of Cornucopia to the city, Nancy O’Connor, parks, recreation, community partnerships director at the City of Ventura, said, “The space created long-lasting friendships and partnerships, with several plots utilized to donate produce to local nonprofits.”
A thriving community garden that has been around for years becomes a huge staple to the local community because it offers neighbors the chance to get to know one another and gives them the chance to make a difference to those in need within their communities.
Helping those in need is exactly what Marco Arroyo and his wife, Rebekka Hansen, want to do. They run G.I.F.T. Garden: Growing in Faith Together in downtown Ventura.
The garden is located on 14,400 square feet off Poli Street and, according to Arroyo, was once owned by Theodosia Burr Shepherd, a famous horticulturist known as the “Flower Wizard of California.” She was the first botanist to hybridize flowers in California. After more than 100 years, the plot is still used as a garden.
In 2017, Arroyo and Hansen made a verbal agreement with owner, Wendy Lascher, whose son, John Wilnar, a local gay rights activist, once ran the COLOR (Community Organized for Liberty, Opportunity and Respect) garden on the same plot. Wilnar didn’t have enough time to keep the gardens up and was thrilled when Arroyo wanted to start another garden on the same plot.
It’s rare to find a garden that has such a storied history, and when asked their plans for the future of the garden, Hansen says, “We want to be able to continue offering plots to those in the Ventura community. We are also going to have a portion where we do the work and we donate that food to FOOD Share and other mediums. We plan on continuing to offer services to homeless people. Although they won’t have their own plot, they will be given food in exchange for their time and labor.”
Not all community gardens offer plots for community members to rent. Some have built up an open space where neighbors can walk inside and harvest the vegetables they may need. When I arrived at Community Roots Garden (CRG) in Oxnard, I was blown away that there were no locks on the gates to keep the general public out.
After my self-guided tour, I met with Tess Potchen, volunteer coordinator at CRG. I was curious how a garden without members could run itself. Normally, garden members will volunteer time to plant, maintain and harvest areas of a community garden that are outside their plots. Potchen told me that CRG has a dedicated group of volunteers from the local area. A few who live nearby have offered to work different sections of the gardens, growing their favorite vegetables or fruits and allowing the community to harvest from the individual plots.
“We get a lot of [California State University] Channel Islands students and they tend to be younger,” she says. “Students will be out here volunteering hours and also doing projects throughout the garden,”
Volunteers on the weekdays also include retired people and younger homeschooled children coming in with their parents. I believe that involving young people is crucial for the future of the gardens and it’s even better when they can learn from older gardeners who pass along their gardening wisdom.
Sometimes the younger generation gets inspired to start gardens of their own, which is the case over at Moorpark College. Very early on a Sunday morning, I met with Payton Robinson and Mikyla Maglente of the Nature’s Finest Club, the organization that runs the student gardens on campus. Robinson, a former student, started the gardens, and Maglente is its current president. The 30 plots are “rented,” free of charge, to the college’s students.
As I walked along the garden beds, I noticed that they are covered by wire mesh to protect the lettuce, cabbage and even dragon fruit from pests. It’s amazing to me how the students learn early on how to deal with pests in an organic and friendly manner.
We walked over to one of the patio tables to talk, and I asked Robinson why he started the gardens. “The skills that come from gardening are so great,” he says. “The long-term gratifications you get from planting the seed to the actual harvest is one of the biggest things you can teach someone. You let them harvest their own success.”
According to Maglente, the garden area is open 24 hours a day and offers students a chance to garden or just relax under the trees. In addition to offering students a place to both meet new friends and grow organic produce, the club donates its surplus to the on-campus food pantry, Grab and Go Groceries.
One of the biggest challenges the club has faced has been getting continuous support from the college’s advisors and administration. The student leaders are optimistically working to solidify the partnership as they realize this support is critical to sustain the future of the gardens for incoming students.
The most common partnership between a community garden and its local community is with a food pantry. While some gardens designate plots for growing produce for their local food pantry, others have garden members who donate their surplus produce.
At Community Roots Garden, which is a ministry of the Methodist Church where it is located, individuals can harvest what they need, and the surplus is taken by volunteers to nearby food pantries.
Cornucopia Gardens has several plots whose produce is donated to local nonprofits.
In Simi Valley, Simi at the Garden has a large “Sharity Garden” where they grow vegetables for donation to their local food pantry, and they also, in partnership with Food Forward, offer a monthly Free Farmers’ Market on the fourth Tuesday of each month in front of the gardens. Jodie Francouer, garden president, says that anyone is welcome at the market. “There’s no qualifications,” she explains. “We don’t ask for any income verifications, and if people feel they need to supplement their groceries or their food for that month, they can come down and get their groceries. We, on average, serve around 700 people every month.”
A community garden’s involvement to help those in need is cherished by the local community. Sometimes the help comes on a regular basis, and sometimes a natural disaster pushes the garden members to be closer than they imagined.
During the Woolsey and Hill fires, many residents in the Conejo Valley and beyond were evacuated from their homes. When Los Flores Garden President Jimmy Winston went to check on the community garden, he found the garden’s parking lot full. The local residents, many of them members, were taking refuge at the garden.
“We [gardeners] are optimists, we naturally believe things are going to work out,” he says. “But this [Woolsey Fire] gave us more of a closeness than we had before. Now we had something personal that affected us all together in the same way. We got on an even closer connection—on a personal level. Before we were just on a community level because we had common goals and thoughts about planting, but this came closer to an emotional connection,” he says, adding that garden members who were not evacuated or in harm’s way opened their homes to those garden members who had been evacuated.
Exploring the community gardens in Ventura County was one of the most educational and eye-opening experiences I have ever had as a gardener. I never realized how connected we all are and how many challenges and successes we share. I am grateful to have met so many wonderful individuals that I look forward to keeping in touch with. I also encourage anyone who is interested in joining a community garden to do so. It is a very rewarding experience.
To learn more about community gardens and where you can find one near you, visit CommunityGardensOfVenturaCounty.org.
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