Mesa Harmony Garden: Catholic Communitarianism in Service to The Human Family

Savanah Maya is a volunteer at Mesa Harmony Garden. The plums are ripe and ready to pick.

We are harvesting nectarines and plums at Mesa Harmony Garden. The Mesa neighborhood gets the cool ocean breeze and the morning fog. Not the best place for growing tomatoes because of the cool breeze, but it’s awfully nice for garden volunteers working among the fruit trees.

That's what we planted on this one-acre plot -- about 100 fruit trees -- plums, peaches, nectarines, apples, and pears mainly, plus a small banana plantation. What people are realizing is that you can grow bananas in Santa Barbara -- this one variety that tolerates our warm and dry but not tropical climate. It will grow little bananas with orange-flavored sweetness, really excellent and toothsome, and banana trees are no trouble -- except they need water and plenty of room.

At Mesa Harmony Garden, we say that "Labor is Free, but Water is Expensive." It's all volunteer work and nobody gets paid, but the water bill comes every month and we are determined to get that monkey off our backs. We spread large quantities of leaf mulch under the trees to delay evaporation and save water.  The city gives this leaf mulch away -- the end-product from the green waste containers. You can pick it up free at several locations. Mesa Harmony Garden, because we are a non-profit, can ask for a truckload -- 10 to 15 yards of mulch, and we can use it all.

Also, the mulch smothers weeds, then breaks down and becomes an organic soil amendment. Good gardeners love mulch.

The other thing we do for water conservation is collect water off the parking lot and the roof of the Parish Hall. I need to backtrack and explain "Parish Hall." The garden occupies a one-acre fenced lot, property of the Holy Cross Catholic Church, but the Mesa Harmony Garden is a separate organization, a formally organized non-profit corporation with a 15-year lease on the premises, which gives us the freedom and time necessary for planting an orchard.

The parking lot, almost as big as the garden itself, is slightly uphill from the garden, so we capture all the runoff at the lower end  and channel the water into a biological swale that will clean it up a bit before it flows onto the fruit trees.

Rain falls on the gutters of the Parish Hall and then flows into an above ground tank and that water gets piped downhill to the garden.  Rain water is free and why waste it.

We do not rent plots to individuals as many community gardens do. The prime directive for this orchard is growing fresh fruit for the Santa Barbara Food Bank. We planted the orchard three years ago and this is the first season we are getting a decent harvest. Last week we picked 50 pounds of white-fleshed nectarines and plums. Next week we can begin harvesting peaches.

 The trees are young and the fruit is small, but by next year we might be harvesting quite a volume of produce.

 And we have gophers -- it's a constant battle. You know what the trick is for dealing with gophers? There is no trick. The only thing I can say is Never Give Up. This is nature in the raw, an endless struggle.

But I always want to believe what I hear about gophers, like someone said they never bother with the pepper plants, so when someone donated some habanero pepper bushes we planted them without gopher cages, and so far the gophers haven't touched them. That makes sense -- would you munch on habanero roots?

Mesa Harmony Garden has volunteer days twice a month. Go to the website and find out how you can help.

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Thanks to friend Fred Owens' "Frog Hospital" for bringing Mesa Harmony to my attention. 

Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214

My blog is Fred Owens

send mail to:

Fred Owens
35 West Main St Suite B #391
Ventura CA 93001