In the Balboa Heights neighborhood in central Tucson, AZ, is a tiny house behind a high fence. The shady front porch hangs with trinkets designed to catch the light and the wind. As I approach on bicycle, I sense wariness from the family resting there, but my companion, a 40-something anarchist from northern California, who goes by Rain, calls a hello. A small blond child comes streaking down the steps. She immediately starts babbling to Rain about bicycles and the folks on the porch wave calmly.
Rain introduces me to the girl, and we all walk behind the house.
The backyard is a dusty lot, with a leaning trailer home, a mound of shale, and the typical cracked dry ground of Tucson backyards.
On the east side of the lot, is a well of green growth. Vines climb up the fence, gourds burrow in the dug, rectangular hole that is several feet deep, orange pumpkins beaming amongst them. At the end of the garden patch is a tall Red Hopi Amaranth plant, beaming amber in the October sunset.
The scene of urban desert abundance is complete with a chicken coop built from wood, wire, and milk crates, a couple of fat cats prowling amongst the vines, and a blind and deaf, snow-white pit bull snuffing along behind us.
Rain is the cofounder and dedicated supporter of the Autonomous Sustainable Community Garden Project. Based in Tucson, the project is in the beginning stages of planting gardens throughout the city. This is their first garden, but one of many ongoing projects.
The garden is only around 300 square feet, but over two seasons has produced an abundant crop of watermelons, squash and pumpkins. Since this writing, a winter crop of garlic has been planted as well.
In addition to the garden, the project organizes urban harvests of herbs, oranges, olives and acorns. They distribute what they produce – from acorn flour breads to herbal tinctures to home-grown garlic – for free amongst the community. The mission of the anarchist collective of 20 or so cooks, gardeners, bakers, and urban cowpokes is to pull as much food and medicine out of the ground that they possibly can, adhering to strict organic, indigenous methods of cultivation and use exclusively native seeds.
They choose crops with long seasons, as the garden is operated by a handful of individuals that come and go. Their summer squashes were all grown from seed obtained from Native Seed/SEARCH.
Native Seed/SEARCH is a non-profit organization committed to the conservation, distribution, and documentation of diverse varieties of agricultural seeds in the American Southwest. They operate a massive seed bank in Tucson, distribute seeds at their retail outlet, host courses in seed conservation and distribution, all with an attempt to build an infrastructure of sustainable food production from Durango, CO to Durango, Mexico. They are, perhaps, the most essential key in localizing crops in Arizona.
The Sustainable Autonomous Community project is less organized, but no less essential as it attracts a much more diverse and active group of people.
The acorn harvest is one of Rain’s favorite events. Most of the acorns are gathered from Oak trees on a Pima Community College Campus.
We go out on bikes and gather as many acorns as we can,” he says excitedly, “then spend a whole day cracking and grinding them.” They make breads, cakes, and other baked goods with the flour, in an outdoor, handmade, wood fired oven.
Within the city of Tucson, and scattered across Arizona, is a movement that struggles to construct a means of food production that is uncomplicated, and unconcerned with governmental policy. From individual gardeners to anarchist collectives like the Community Garden Project, people are relearning what it means to feed themselves and each other. Rejecting corporate control by simply opting out of it, these small time farmers, committed to their own healthy community, are coaxing life out of one of the harshest environments in the lower forty-eight.
Backyard gardener, Ashley Fortune, is another Tucson resident growing native seeds. She is an independent gardener, not affiliated with any organization or collective.
“I believe,” Fortune says, “that the food that is adapted to thriving here, can help me thrive.” This winter, she is growing hearty winter greens outside her apartment in an old sink.
“I found this in a junkyard,” she explains, pointing to the waist high kitchen sink with three tubs of dirt. “I harvest the greens in a rotation, each variety about once a week.” Fortune uses the old sink because her backyard is only a small paved patio. This kind of ingenuity is common among Tucson backyard gardeners.
Hutches, on the other hand, worked for weeks turning his backyard garden plot into a farmable piece of land. After digging a ditch over 2’ deep, removing the shale, and introducing nutrient-rich soil, the plot is perfect for the types of crops he wants to grow, because it retains water in its well.
The model for the Autonomous Sustainable Community Project is based on another functioning model in Prescott, Arizona, called Karma Farms.
Founder of Karma Farms, Thomas Keene, has been the leading force of Karma Farms for over 5 years, but the collective is strictly anarchist. The point of an anarchist collective is to keep the participants separate from the struggles of hierarchically structured operations.
Karma Farms operates five to eight backyard gardens in Prescott, AZ depending on the season and available volunteers. Politically tense Prescott has had issues with the rag-tag group of farmers often seen cycling around town with tubs of manure, coffee grounds donated from local shops, or grazing their two goats on a hillside in the middle of the small town.
Overall, there is enough support for the organization to stay alive, and that has a lot to do with the essential contributions of Karma Farms. Each Thursday, they hold a stand offering free produce. Often participants will make trades with Karma Farm volunteers, but they offer herbal medicines, food, and small services to anyone in need without asking for anything in exchange. “That,” says Keene, “is hard to argue with.”
The main challenge for these gardeners is the great deal of water necessary. This is water that comes out of pipe, not the sky, because of the dry southern Arizona climate.
Each has hopes of developing rainwater harvesting catchment systems that will help them make the most of natural rainfall and force them to use less water provided by the rapidly emptying Tucson aquifers. Fortunately, the knowledge of how to do this is available in activist community of Tucson. Applying the often costly infrastructure is the difficult part.
These providers, because they offer a hyper local service for free, are a new side of the rapidly expanding local farm movement.
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