By Fia Powers PZ ’25, Cameron Macdonald PZ ’25, Wynne Chase PZ ’26

Originally published in The Student Life

Close your eyes and imagine a world where you could walk down the block to pick up produce from a nearby garden. Is this something you can do? Probably not. Is it possible, though? Yes.

Community gardens are the key to making this dream a reality.

The pandemic has created an aftermath of trauma, health risks, food insecurity, and a general lack of care. Community gardens offer practical, hands-on solutions for communities to take care of each other in hard times, all of which can be alleviated with a communal agricultural space.

During both World Wars, community gardens experienced a moment of heightened popularity in North America and Europe. They provided a space for communities to gather and watch their produce flourish, increasing fruit and vegetable consumption without increasing spending on store-bought produce. Thus, community gardens bolstered overall health by supporting people through economic deficits.

Unfortunately, the popularity of community gardens has since taken a plunge. Following the wars, lack of access to food was no longer a widespread problem, so the prevalence of community gardens began to dissipate.

Today, demand is back — or at least, it should be. We need a defense against the countless warehouses as national resources and infrastructure (expectedly) abandon civilians in favor of corporate industrial interests.

Specifically, this affects communities within the Inland Empire (IE), which have few defenses against pollution and development.

The IE was once known for its lucrative citrus production, but has since transformed from sprawling agriculture into more than a billion square feet of warehouses. This caused a severe increase in carbon emissions, as well as a rapid destruction of natural landscape and communal green spaces. Residential communities are isolated from sources of healthy food and choked in diesel truck fumes.

Inaccessible healthy foods and fractured community connections are what sparked the founding of the Huerta del Valle project. Huerta del Valle is a community-run farm project with several locations through the inland valley. Their goal is to create “one garden every mile.”  

But while Huerta del Valle has grown and flourished, so has the steady march of industrial warehouses.

The South Coast air basin (which includes Los Angeles, Orange County, and Riverside) has some of the worst recorded levels of carbon emissions in the country. As one of many responses to this crisis, Huerta del Valle offers The Community Composting Program (TCCP), which builds relationships with their neighbors.

TCCP focuses on engaging with households within a one-mile radius of Huerta del Valle through education and participation in communal composting of local food waste. The compost is brought back into the community for people who want to develop and nourish their own gardens, creating a cycle that emphasizes mutually beneficial interdependence and empowers individual households to grow their own food using locally-nurtured soil. 

Huerta del Valle is developing programs that engage the community by relying on local community networks to move away from participating in national, corporate systems. 

National resources and infrastructure during wartime were dedicated primarily to supporting the military, which abandoned the food and health needs of civilians. Now, resources go toward corporate and industrial interests. In both instances, communities of civilians  — whose labor oftentimes supports the industry — suffer from national negligence.

For this reason, Huerta’s values of community health and well-being as well as their practice of radical community care are absolutely critical. 

The call for community action became increasingly important this past season when Huerta was broken into, and over $10,000 to $15,000 of tools, including generators, were stolen. 

So, find the time to visit a Huerta del Valle community garden to witness a real-life organization providing community support and health resources. Whether you want to rent a plot to grow your own food, buy fresh veggies, enjoy nature, or just meet and chat with members, there is a place for you. 

Now more than ever, the project relies on people of the community — people like you — to get involved.