The late Karl Erickson was a community member of Superior who passed away unexpectedly. He had a dream of turning a lot he owned at 225 N Pinal Ave. into something beneficial for the community. His estate knew about Regenerating Sonora’s ambition to start a community garden and offered it to us at the cost of the legal fees to transfer ownership. Regen Sonora wanted to get a community garden going after seeing first hand how dependent we were on bringing outside food in during COVID.

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In Spring of 2021, with gratitude to him and his family, we acquired it and got to work cleaning up the place.

Local school teacher Mary Martha Nilan and some of her students helping us clear the land.

It took time to form the team who would help with doing the work and to decide on a phase 1 design. After a number of starts and stops, it finally became clear that trying to move projects forward in an economically depressed community solely on the backs of unpaid volunteers was a no go for sustained progress. Most people work multiple jobs just to pay rent and eat, so volunteering at the garden means paying a significant opportunity cost. First we experimented with Crypto to test the hypothesis and then eventually moved to full on paying people real money as contractors. Still, not everyone, like Miguel, wanted payment for their work.

The work team formed and we got started building our first LEHR Garden in the Fall of 2021. Eventually, we added three more LEHRs at the site, hosted a number of lunar garden parties, and began getting some great yields.

Word of our work got to Lynn Umphres from the Arizona Community Foundation who was inspired by what we were doing. Her and her late partner Tom Hall would frequent Superior and they loved the natural beauty and feel of the town. When he passed, he left her funds for her to support a philanthropic effort. In Fall of 2022, she offered to help us acquire the neighboring lot enabling us to roughly triple our growing space!

In Spring of 2023 we were awarded a $12,000 grant from Pinnacle Prevention which allow us to invest in solar panels for the garden, workshop tools, and materials for building six more LEHRs. We used a portion of the funds to help a neighboring community project in San Manuel, AZ get a LEHR of their own.

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After spending more time with the land and talking with our team, we decided that instead of using the additional lot to pack more LEHRs on it…we want to use the space for more community gatherings and to demonstrate various forms of growing techniques so our neighbors can get inspired to grow in their own yards. We’re also working on securing grant funding to build a ramada which will enhance our community as a whole and provide much needed solar power to the garden, along with an outdoor kitchen and rainwater harvesting component. The ramada will help make our garden even more of a community hub and will enable so many more activities!

Master gardener Mindy talking to Miracle about tree options while the work team Julio and Mike put together build the first part of our fence on the new addition.

We’re also helping to start a JR Master Gardener program which we’ll kick off August 2024

At the same time, we’ll still build those six LEHRs but instead of putting them all at our garden, we’ll gift them to our neighbors. By inspiring our neighbors and working to make it easy for them grow food, we’re advancing our aim of Relocalizing Our Food System!