A World of Gardening Traditions at the Hayward Community Garden

By Rachel Trachten | Photos by Zach Pine

 

 

Gustavo Fuentes wasn’t keen on the snails eating his lettuce and spinach, so he built a clever vertical planter from wooden pallets to keep the seedlings off the ground. His wife, Felicita Salinas, says they both learned to grow food while growing up in El Salvador.

“We were taught to plant our own vegetables, to grow flowers, to use our corn to make masa for tortillas,” she says. When the couple moved to an apartment in Hayward, they were eager to join the Hayward Community Garden.

It took weeks of waiting, but now the family of six (they have four young boys) has two side-by-side plots where they grow a large portion of their household produce. In early spring, they already have spinach, lettuce, cauliflower, herbs, and strawberries. The couple is happy to share their extensive know-how with other gardeners.

On weekends, the whole family heads to the garden, often bringing a picnic. “In the summer, we go at seven in the morning, and we come home at seven at night,” says Salinas, who sets up water tables where her boys and other kids can splash toys around on hot days.

The Hayward Community Garden was founded by a church group in the 1970s. The opportunity to garden quickly attracted local immigrants from Mexico, Central America, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa, all of whom enjoy sharing their agricultural knowledge and traditions. Located in Hayward’s Jackson Triangle neighborhood beside a low-rise housing complex, the garden sits on PG&E land that’s leased to the Hayward Area Recreation Department (HARD). After a temporary closure for renovation work in 2016, the garden reopened in 2019 with 70 plots for individual or shared use, eight plots that meet ADA requirements for gardeners with disabilities, and two plots used for classes and demos by master gardeners. Three beehives were added in 2023.

 

 

Knowing the Person Who Grew Your Food

“Gardeners come from all over the world and grow a wonderful array of edibles,” says Becky Abbott, who works as the garden’s coordinator. “That’s been the real pleasure for me—getting to know people. Gardeners are super opinionated and also super generous; we’re all bound together by our love of the garden.”

As the child of missionaries, Abbott lived in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Turkey. “I grew up in these pretty remote places where everything you ate, you knew the person who grew it or the person who killed the animal that’s feeding you. And so that relationship was very well established for me.”

In Turkey, she spent a lot of time on local farms. “That was just something we would do on the weekend: We’d hop on somebody’s horse cart—literally a horse cart—and we’d ride out to a farm and help pick parsley or tomatoes or peppers, and we had these amazing meals in the fields.”

When she was 16, Abbott’s family moved into a radical Christian community with a large organic garden near Plains, Georgia, and at age 20, she moved to the Bay Area, got involved with SLUG (the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners), and became an ESL teacher. “Being in this garden is being at home for me,” she adds.

 

 

Nettles, Tomatoes, and Popping Corn

On a walk through the garden, Abbott stops to greet Peter Nykngau, a Kenyan gardener who with his friend Francis Nykundi is stringing up nettles that they’ll dry and use to make tea. Abbott asks when he’ll plant chinsaga, an African herb known for its anti-inflammatory properties, and he tells her he’ll wait two more months.

Next Abbott visits Janet and Dan Margolis, who are pulling weeds to prepare their plot for summer planting. Janet is a master gardener who grows tomatoes, basil, and garlic to make her own tomato sauce. In a nearby plot, Abbott greets Mebrak, a gardener from Eritrea eager to display the arugula, Italian dandelion, and chard she grows for salads.

 

 

For some garden members, growing food is a beloved hobby or a chance to pass skills on to their children; for others, it’s a way to help defray the high cost of groceries.

Vinmathi Iyappan and Vignesh Kumar Rasupandi moved to Hayward so she could pursue a master’s degree in business analytics at Cal State East Bay while he works as an electrical engineer. They grow foods like red pearl onions, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, Thai basil, and coriander that they use in their traditional Indian dishes.

“In Indian-style cooking we use garlic a lot, but it’s expensive in the Bay Area,” says Iyappan. Last September, they planted a large crop of garlic that they’ll harvest in May. Their surplus of summer tomatoes will be made into paste that they’ll freeze for use throughout the year.

 

 

Gardener Gail Pratt, a retired benefits administrator, started gardening just a year ago. She has also had success with tomatoes. “I’d never been a fan of tomatoes until I grew some Early Girls and they were awesome,” says Pratt. A fellow gardener introduced her to black tomatoes, and last summer, she also grew cherry tomatoes, which she enjoyed over spaghetti along with her fresh-picked basil. “It’s like an experiment for me—trying to get stuff to grow—and I find that I’m doing okay with it.”

Pratt’s plot is thick with collards (the first thing she grew because it’s a regular staple of her diet) as well as basil. She documents her efforts on a delightful YouTube channel called 2 Grannies Gardening. “It’s another learning tool,” she says. Sometimes she turns to fellow gardeners Felicita Salinas and Gustavo Fuentes, who have generously helped her with garden cleanup and answered her many questions.

 

 

Master gardener Diana Thormoto grew so many tomatoes last summer that she was giving them away. “I learned tons of gardening from my mama,” says Thormoto, whose mother also nurtured 40 rose bushes. Thormoto is now passing her green thumb on to her six-year-old daughter, Lilith. “The only peas my daughter will eat are when we grow them in the garden, so we grow a ton of sugar snap peas.” They also grow pumpkins, and at Lilith’s request, Tom Thumb popping corn.

To involve more children, Abbott is hoping to establish a garden plot for a local school. She also wants to offer a class in small-container gardening for apartment dwellers.

Felicita Salinas views the garden as a place where all people can tap into a deeply held need. Even someone who has never grown anything, she says, likely has a grandparent who did. “They have it in their blood, but maybe they weren’t taught how to do it. So, they have that feeling, ‘well, I just want to grow something,’ and they’re just pulled into gardening.” ´

Learn more about the garden at haywardrec.org.

 

Visiting the Hayward Community Garden inspired writer Rachel Trachten and photographer Zach Pine to plant more sugar snap peas in their tiny Berkeley garden. Read Rachel’s stories at clippings.me/users/rachel_trachten and learn about Zach’s environmental art projects at zpcreatewithnature.com and sandglobes.org.

Becky’s Bazargan

Becky Abbott, coordinator of the Hayward Community Garden, shared this recipe for bazargan, a traditional Syrian tabouli salad.

“When I was age 11–15, I lived in a Syrian neighborhood in the southern Turkish city of Tarsus,” says Abbott. “We would go out to the farms that our neighbors owned and often have this salad. We would eat it out of a large common bowl, scooping it with romaine lettuce leaves. Afiyet Olson!”

 

 

Serves 4

• 1 ½ cups bulgur wheat
• 2 medium tomatoes, diced
• 1 medium cucumber, diced
• 2–3 scallions, chopped
• ½ cup chopped flat leaf parsley
• 1 tablespoon chopped mint leaves
• 1 teaspoon cumin
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste
• 1 tablespoon Aleppo pepper
• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 1 tablespoon pomegranate molasses (or more to taste)
• Salt, pepper to taste
• 1 head romaine lettuce

 

Soak the bulgur in water for 1–2 hours to rehydrate or cook in boiling water for 12 minutes at a simmer. It should be al dente.

Toss the softened bulgur with the olive oil and lemon juice, then mix all the ingredients together. Let sit at least 15 minutes for flavors to meld.

Optional: Top with pomegranate seeds and chopped walnuts.