Healdsburg community garden gifted an $89,000 tractor

Established on a privately owned 1-acre plot of land, the Healdsburg garden, which has been lovingly dubbed “Jardín del Pueblo” (The People’s Garden) by one of the volunteers who tends it, is a source of great community pride.

Last Wednesday, an anonymous donor, aware of what it means to those who not only grow produce in the garden but benefit from its bounty, donated an electric tractor — valued at $89,000 — to help tend the various crops.

On most Saturday mornings before the sun rises, Patricio Cadena and Santiago Madrigal Rojas check the rows of chilies, tomatoes, zucchini and other produce that are growing in the garden.

Madrigal Rojas, who also works as a farmworker, said that tending the garden is a way for him to return to his roots. He grew up in a farming community in Mexico and remembers spending more time in the fields than at school.

“One feels comfortable here,” he said.

Cadena, who also works as a farmworker, added, “Everything is fresh.”

“I like the fields. I like helping people,” he said.

They are just two out of about 40 volunteers who have tended the privately owned 1-acre plot since 2022.

It has since become a bustling community garden, helping to fight food insecurity and support job training, said land owner Zeke Guzman, president of Latinos Unidos del Condado de Sonoma, a Santa Rosa-based farmworker advocacy group.

Most of the volunteers are local farmworkers who come on their days off, some after long nights of harvest, to tend to the garden before they take veggies home to feed their families, Guzman said.

Volunteers show up every Saturday from mid-July through mid-November. Most live in apartments, so this is a way to connect them to their “own histories, their own culture, what sustains them and allows them to feel alive,” he said.

The produce is the type of food many grew up eating in Mexico, where many of the volunteers came from, which adds to the garden’s significance, he said.

“They decided on the vegetables, the different type of tomato plants, … I’m letting them develop a garden as to what they eat and what gets consumed,” Guzman said. There are also hibiscus plants, at least four varieties of chilies, rows of cactus and a few types of tomatoes laid neatly on each row.

The tractor’s arrival was celebrated by about 10 supporters weeks after roughly 30 people had gathered on a drizzly Oct. 14 morning for a tractor that never arrived.

A miscommunication about paperwork was blamed for the delay, Guzman said.

“I'm not just going to use this tractor just for farming. I'm going to use it for workforce development,” he said.

A decadeslong farmworker advocate, Guzman hopes to provide training sessions with the tractor’s manufacturer to the garden’s volunteers, such as Cadena and Madrigal Rojas, to help them in their daily work.

This year’s harvest produced about 8,000 pounds of food that has been donated to members of the community, said Duskie Estes, executive director of Farm to Pantry.

The Healdsburg-based nonprofit helps farmers glean their produce to donate to local organizations and has been integral in distributing the garden’s produce to the community, Guzman said.

Community effort

A network of local players helped lay the groundwork that led to the garden’s creation and, later, for the tractor’s donation.

The community garden, Guzman said, was established with support from Estes at Farm to Pantry and Bruce Mentzer, co-founder of Farm to Fight Hunger.

The idea for the garden was born after Guzman paid a visit to Mentzer and his husband Anthony Solar. Their 5-acre farm donates its veggies and eggs to the community.

“Part of what we do, in addition to growing the vegetables on our own farm, is we start thousands of seedlings in the winter. We donate the plants to folks like Zeke who are basically growing to give,” he said.

These include thousands of starter seedlings for the rows of red and green papilla, jalapeño and serrano chilies, he said.

“It’s tailored to the community that needs it and that’s what Zeke’s doing,” Mentzer said. His farm, according to Guzman, also donated a greenhouse to the garden that volunteers use to store seedlings in.

Martin Mileck, founder of Cold Creek Compost, who has collaborated with Mentzer and Estes for years, donated much of the fertilizer used in the garden.

Guzman was involved with food distribution in years past and knew Estes from Farm to Pantry, which helped coordinate distribution over the last two seasons.

During that period, the garden has produced 12,000 pounds of produce, Estes said.

The tractor’s journey

The idea to donate a tractor began with a single phone call to Sonoma Land Trust Board member Quincey Tompkins Imhoff, said Shannon Nichols, director of philanthropy.

An anonymous donor wanted to offer the $89,000, all-electric Monarch MK-V tractor to Sonoma Land Trust, a nonprofit that acquires and restores land and helps connect the community to nature, Nichols said.

“We felt … it really should go to a farm where a farm is operating,” she said.

Tompkins Imhoff spoke to Mentzer, who spoke to Estes and they came to the conclusion that the community garden run by Guzman in Healdsburg would be the best place for the tractor, she said.

“We were in touch with the family who donated it and recommended that it come here and they were very pleased to have it be serving in this way,” Nichols said at the second gathering last week to welcome the tractor’s arrival.

Plans to grow

One of the community garden’s volunteers, Norma Alvarez, attended both days to celebrate the tractor’s arrival. Though she is relatively new to working in agriculture, Alvarez said she is excited to put the tractor to use.

“I want to teach myself,” she said after she saw the tractor parked next to the community garden.

She splits her time volunteering between the community garden and Farm to Fight Hunger, she said.

After the last vegetables are picked, the plan is to mulch the garden and plant a cover crop over the winter, Guzman said. They’ll use the tractor to “help disc and plow and get the soil ready for next year,” he added.

Looking to the future, there are also plans to expand the garden. Children who’ve joined their parents also want a stake in what’s being produced.

"The children who have volunteered here, they asked me if they could have their own garden,“ Guzman said, adding that they’ll likely plant strawberries, blueberries, blackberries and raspberries.

To the main garden, he said, volunteers will likely add banana plants. The leaves are often used as a tamale wrap in Oaxaca and Central America, unlike the corn husks used throughout most of Mexico.

They will also likely add chayote and peanuts too, he said.

“They’re laying out the plan. It’s their garden,” Guzman said.

You can reach Staff Writer Jennifer Sawhney at 707-521-5346 or jennifer.sawhney@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @sawhney_media.