Sonoran Kitchen Gardens

The Green Grannies started Sonoran Kitchen Gardens in early 2008 to make sure every school in the Sonoran bioregion (southern Arizona and northern Mexico) has a drylands kitchen garden linked into our local food economy. Currently most of our food is imported from an average of 1500 miles away, making our region vulnerable to fuel shortages. We aim to make our region food secure.

Mesquite Crop Harvest:

Right now--May 2008--a bumper crop of mesquite pods is maturing on the mesquite trees of our region. By June the harvest will be in full swing. Sonoran Kitchen Gardens' prime mission for the summer is to harvest, process, and store tons of mesquite pods and mesquite meal. See our mesquite page for more inform- ation about this important and abundant food crop.

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands Gardens - Ferro-cement cistern workshop:

Hoping to harvest the monsoon rains of the summer of '08, people are building cisterns to harvest rainwater. For more information, visit rainwaterharvesting.org. A low cost rainwater harvesting cistern can be built from ferro- cement. If you are interested in attending our late May workshop on how to build a ferro- cement rainwater harvesting cistern, call 325-8752.

Three Sisters Gardens Should be Ready by Monsoon Rains:

The three sisters - corn beans and squash - were the survival foods of the native peoples of Sonora. Visit Native Seeds/SEARCH to learn which seeds grow best in the monsoon rains. By early July, your three sisters garden pits should be dug and filled with good compost, seeds should be in the ground waiting for the rains, and you should have straw ready to cover the soil once the seeds have sprouted.

Our Work:

We are helping to establish drylands kitchen gardens in schools, places of worship, and urban neighborhoods, linked into a local food system from seed to table. Allied with Native Seed/SEARCH, local chefs, and farmers markets, we promote kids snack gardens in day care centers, elementary and middle schools and high schools. When kids grow their own food, they eat healthy snacks like cherry tomatoes, carrots, snow peas, and cucumbers.

We are helping schools develop kitchen garden curricula, including rainwater harvesting, three sisters gardens (corn, squash and beans), teen snack gardens, composting, green porta- potties for large public events, neighborhood food storage, groves of food-producing trees like mesquite and citrus, food related cottage industry incubation, and locavore culture.

Sonoran Kitchen Gardens is part of the growing urban agriculture movement.

Here are links to two articles, one about the profound effect of fresh vegetables on a student population, and one about urban agriculture: