Behind a fence wrapped in climbing plants on the side of a community baseball field, a giant sign reads Huerta del Valle. At the entrance, people tend to their gardens on each side of the dirt path that leads to a picnic table covered by pomegranate trees decorated with hanging light bulbs.
The sweet smell of freshly picked guavas welcomes you to the market at the end of the trail.
In the background, one woman hauls a wheel barrel of lemongrass and kale, while two others carry folding chairs, cracking jokes in Spanish. They poke fun at a petite woman not quite five feet tall in a yellow t-shirt and jeans, who is busy shouting orders and rearranging tables and heavy boxes.
The subject of their gentle teasing is the founder of the place, Maria Alonso, a Mexican native with dark strawberry blond hair, and a cheek-to-cheek smile. Alonso, founder of Huerta del Valle, a community garden in Ontario, California, leads what to some may look like a chaotic operation but in fact is a synchronized team effort to bring organic produce accessible to low income families.
Beyond growing local food, Alonso is growing a community.
“I’m really proud because we’ve been able to make everyone feel at home,” Alonso said, setting down the containers of mini eggplants and pomegranates. “We all work together, with love. All for one and one for all.”
Their purpose is to create a space where members of the community can buy or grow their own food. For a $30 a month donation, people rent a ten by twenty feet garden box where they can tend to their own garden to provide for their families. There’s also land dedicated to urban farming which supplies their weekly farmers’ market and community supported agriculture boxes. Visitors can also volunteer and take home a pound of fruits or vegetables for every hour they work. But Alonso’s vision is to see one garden every mile in Ontario, where everyone can have access to nutritious sustainably produced food, just like she had back home.
Alonso came to the United States from a small town called Vista Hermosa in Michoacán, Mexico. She was the eldest daughter and the ninth child of 18 growing up in a rural area of the country. Her family raised cattle for a living and grew their own food on the ranch. Little did she know that moving to the United States she would return to the farm life.
Today, we are more disconnected from our food sources than ever before. The convenience of being able to choose what fruits and vegetables we get at a supermarket wasn’t an option for many who depended on their harvest that season. Even for Alonso, going to the supermarket wasn’t really a thing for her family in Mexico. If her mom was making huevos rancheros for breakfast, they’d send her to the chicken pens to pick up some eggs and pull chiles verdes from their vegetable garden.
Our industrial agriculture may make growing food “efficient,” but it is far from sustainable. The world’s industrial food system is responsible for 44 to 57% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Excessive use of fertilizers contaminate water sources and create hypoxic dead zones. Tilling and plowing practices have eroded nearly half of our topsoil in the last 150 years. Food is wasted from crops left unharvested or unchosen by grocery stores.
One way to promote sustainable farming is by building a community around agriculture and connecting people to their food source. With the community garden and urban farm, Alonso founded educational programs teaching her neighbors how food is grown and providing them a space to garden for their own families. She teaches regenerative agricultural practices that encourage biodiversity in the fields, strengthen the soil, and doesn’t use pesticides.
Alonso agrees that there’s a need to reconnect with our food source. “Our climate system is getting out of hand because we’re missing these things, [connection to our food source and regenerative agricultural practices] ” she said. “It might seem insignificant, but for the environment it’s a big help. It’s like the lung for climate.”
Community gardens aren’t new to the U.S. They’ve been around since the 1890s to make up for the lack of available food during a recession or in impoverished neighborhoods. Hungarians and Polish immigrants were the first to build community gardens in the U.S. in Detroit, which led to other cities like Boston and San Francisco creating their own. Today there are over 29,000 community gardens in the U.S.
Even though Alonso has been a part of this agricultural movement, she originally refused to follow in her parents footsteps as farmers and cattle ranchers. Alonso became a nurse and a single mother in Michoacan. Looking for a better life for her children, she left her two daughters with her parents and immigrated to the U.S. undocumented in 1989.
It was a rough start. She came to live with her brother, who had been in the country for several years. He was living in a garage with 14 other people in La Puente.
“I regretted it as soon as I got here,” Alonso said. “That garage became a king size bed for everyone. I was like, wow, is this what it’s like to live in the United States? I don’t want to be here.“
Two days later, Alonso left and found a job babysitting, cleaning real estate offices, the DMV, anything she could to provide for her family.
Her last job was as a conversational tutor for the Claremont Colleges Spanish program where students visited her home three times a week to practice with a native speaker. By this time she was reunited with her two daughters and had a two-year-old son.
In 2010, her son was diagnosed with ADHD. At 10 years old, doctors prescribed him medications to manage his symptoms.
“I was surprised. He was so young and I was so much older and I didn’t have to take medications,” she said.
The doctor suggested her son eat organic foods as an alternative. To Alonso, it was the obvious choice, until she realized how expensive it was.
“One small bunch of Kale was $3.99, a melon seven dollars,” Alonso said covering her face while shaking her head.
In one of her sessions with students from Claremont Colleges, everyone in the group was sharing personal stories in Spanish. She told the group about her son’s diagnosis and her conversation with the doctor.
“I was telling them about my struggle to find affordable organic food and my son’s situation and one of them tells me, ‘Maria, why don’t you work with community gardens. I’m currently doing my thesis in community gardens,’” Alonso recalls one of her students saying. “The idea fascinated me and when she told me more about it, we jumped right into it.”
It all started with Richard Hernandez, then the executive director of Fresh Start Ministries, which was an organization that provided court-ordered community service opportunities for youth and adults. He lent Alonso a garden bed to plant her own fruits and vegetables.
Hernadez connected Alonso with a school in Ontario that provided a bed for her to grow her first crop. Within a year she had grown onions, kale, cucumbers and the bigger the garden grew the more people wanted to visit. This became an issue with the school’s management when visitors didn’t want to sign-in.
“Everyone who wanted to take part in the garden needed to get their fingerprints taken,” Alonso said. “Many people didn’t want to, so we had to move.”
Two years later, Alonso transplanted the garden to someone’s home, but around the same time Kaiser Permanente was looking to rent out a place where the garden is located now in Ontario. The city, after seeing Alonso’s flourishing plot of land, asked her if she wanted to build a bigger version of her humble garden. Without hesitation, Alonso accepted the offer. What started with two and a half acres of land, has now expanded to almost 50 acres in the last 10 years.
“They’ve come a long way since the beginning roots of Huerta del Valle,” Ontario resident, Celina Lopez said. “I think it’s important we have a community garden here, especially with the Latino community. It brings some of their culture. They come here and bring a little bit of who they are.”
Expanding across their different campuses from the hills of Jurupa Valley in Riverside to the inner city of San Bernardino, their urban farms grow thousands of pounds of produce they sell at their local markets for only a dollar or two a pound. Every Saturday, their four campuses host open markets selling seasonal produce from cute mini eggplants and chiles to juicy ripe pomegranates and cucumbers that sit in separate containers, waiting to be chosen. Their Community Supported Agriculture CSA boxes run from February to September.
The local markets and CSA boxes are currently their main source of income to support the farm’s practices and programs. However, the community garden is the heart of Huerta del Valle where people can rent a plot of land and grow their own food. They currently have 62 family plots and their goal is to double the amount by next year.
Alonso never imagined her garden that started as an alternative form of medicine for her son would transform into a 200 square foot box to four urban farms and community gardens spread across San Bernardino and Riverside County. What started with two and a half acres of land, has expanded to almost 50 acres in the last 10 years.
When she enters Huerta del Valle, she’s welcomed by the murmuring sound of water running and leaves ruffling plays in the background. There’s a calming sensation energized by the growing plants. In the middle of a developing city surrounded by a concrete jungle, it’s an oasis.