Mesa Harmony Garden

05/27/2023

05/12/2023

Exploring Food Forests
Our first Saturday workshop on May 6th was a great opportunity to learn about Backyard Food Forests. Larry Saltzman shared his many years of experience and explained how his process in designing Mesa Harmony Garden could be used to create food forests in our own backyards. He told us that food forests may result from using permaculture design, but have also been observed in different parts of the world thanks to indigenous ecosystem management practices. He emphasized the importance of designing to fit local conditions, for example how in our Mediterranean climate we can grow fruit trees in much closer proximity than would make sense in more temperate zones.
At the end of the workshop, participants joined Larry in a guided exploration of Mesa Harmony Garden’s Community Food Forest, as he pointed out the different elements of the design and responded to the many questions and comments from the participants. People asked about the benefits of different understory plants, and how we capture and store rainwater, and of course wanted to know which kinds of fruit trees are doing well.
A friend recently shared an article that expanded my thinking about urban food forests to include the idea of Neighborhood Food Forests. This article described a community where neighbors are working together to reshape their sidewalks so that they “… are lined with native, food-bearing trees and shrubs fed by rainwater diverted from city streets”. [https://flip.it/BMsV9r].
This initiative is coordinated by the Dunbar/Spring Neighborhood Foresters, based in the Dunbar Spring neighborhood of Tucson, Arizona. According to their website, they have focused their efforts on rainwater harvesting and planting native plants: “Since 1996 we’ve collaborated with our neighbors to plant over 1,600 native food- and medicine-bearing trees and many hundreds of multi-use native understory plants”.
Mesa Harmony Garden donates fresh produce to the Food bank, and acts as a demonstration site for sustainable, regenerative urban landscaping. We hope our achievements will encourage others with under-utilized land at their disposal to re-design these spaces as urban food forests that could also be of service to our wider community… whether that’s in a backyard, a shared community space or throughout a neighborhood.
Feel like being inspired? We’re here every Saturday morning, 9am-12pm – come and join us, there’s always more to learn. To keep informed about Mesa Harmony Garden, join our email list at www.mesaharmonygarden.org.

09/28/2022

NEW free, monthly "Garden Talks" on Zoom! One Monday each month, we share useful, interesting, research-based home gardening information with gardeners of all experience levels. These talks may be recorded.

06/30/2022

Collage of the fruit harvested and donated in kind to the local Food Bank this year

06/13/2022

10 years ago, only cost us a Chinese lunch.

05/06/2022

We have a big day in the garden on Saturday: -

The last day of the plant sale, 9-12
A workshop on Backyard Food Forests with Larry Saltzman,
Fred Hunter and Russ Baldocchi
Volunteers to lead

03/06/2022

We opened up the garden for the first time in two years yesterday, with our long-awaited volunteer orientation event. It was great to be able to gather in the meeting circle, to greet old friends, and to sign up 14 new volunteers who all seemed excited at the prospect of coming back to get involved in our work.

Many thanks to Janet, John, Joe, Russ, Susan-Claire and Vicki for making the morning such a smooth-running and informative event for everyone.

NEXT Saturday (March 12th - starting at 9am) we need help loading a truck with the pile of brush that has accumulated near the garden entrance, so we have space to hold our plant sale (bring good gloves, some of those cuttings have thorns on them).

Our spring plant sale will be on April 2nd, and now is the time for you to bring us any plants you can donate to help us raise money to cover our running costs. If you have plants to donate, please bring them to the garden on a Saturday morning before the end of March.
We could also use some decorative pots to make succulent arrangements for the sale – if you have any to donate, please bring over to the garden soon.

Hope to see you in the garden soon

05/07/2021

Deacon Randy Saake started the Mesa Harmony Garden 11 years ago on vacant land behind Holy Cross Church in Santa Barbara.

04/20/2021

Back in December, we put out a plea for someone with a large truck to come over and help us out by taking our large and growing brush pile to the county dump …

That didn’t happen, and the pile kept on growing – until last Friday afternoon when Arbor Services made some space in their busy schedule to bring their chipper to the garden and solve the problem for us. As you’ll see from this sequence of photos, the problem of the brush pile has been turned into the solution of more mulch to spread out around the garden.

Many thanks to Karen and the team at Arbor Services for helping us out, especially Logan and Jesus who did all the hard work.

04/06/2021

Springtime in the Mesa Harmony Garden

04/06/2021

Food sovereignty is a phrase you might have heard along with food justice, access, and security. This movement aims to foster democracy, rooted in our local food systems. This looks like: teaching peasant agroecology, protecting the jobs of food producers, and redistributing land.

At their cores, food sovereignty and food justice are similar in their struggle for healthy, democratic, sustainable food systems. While food justice movements directly challenge specific historical, racial, and economic injustices, food sovereignty takes issue with the deeper systemic, hierarchical cause behind them.

To connect and learn more about food sovereignty, join our mailing list at https://www.sbcfoodaction.org/join/. We'll highlight stories from the community – and share learnings for building a more resilient food system in Santa Barbara County.

02/26/2021

Celebrate the Santa Barbara Community Seed Swap 2021 Local Food Hero Award Honoring the Santa Barbara Farmers Market Saturday, February 27, 11am At the Downtown Farmers Market Info Booth Santa Barbara St & Cota St Santa Barbara, CA 93101 Please join us!