Update from the Executive Director
By Julie Robinson, Executive Director
Dear Friends of the Garden,
If you’ve been following our emails, you know that this has been a busy spring at Mission Garden! In collaboration with our wonderful partners, we’ve been hosting many fun educational events from the Agave Heritage Festival, to the Pueblos del Maiz corn festival and the San Ysidro Festival. At the San Ysidro Wheat Harvest Festival, staff and volunteers harvested and ground our field grown heirloom White Sonora wheat. O'odham guest chef Betty Pancho made handmade flour tortillas over our wood-fired comal, and volunteer Vanda Pollard took the lead in cooking up big pots of posole de trigo, a unique Sonoran favorite from a recipe shared by Armida Elena Contreras de Maldonado. In case you missed being at the Garden for San Ysidro, Curator Dena Cowan included two recipes at the end of this newsletter for making this lovely, healthy soup at home.
If you were following local media, you might have caught the next to last episode of this season’s Top Chef series, which was filmed in Tucson. We had to contain our excitement and not reveal that our very own Board Member, Jesús García, participated as a judge in the episode which aired Thursday, May 26th on the Bravo Network. A key segment of the show was filmed at Mission Garden and a number of featured ingredients were harvested onsite (more here).
And speaking of Board Members, all of us would like to extend a warm welcome to the newest arrival to the Friends of Tucson’s Birthplace Board of Directors, Chuck Graf. Many of you know him from his volunteer work in the Garden as a docent and for photographing all the trees and flora for visual ID use in Storymaps (see Dena’s article in this issue for more about this:). Chuck is a retired hydrologist and jumping in to provide research support for Tucson Origins Heritage Park, a Friends of Tucson’s Birthplace project, while also lending us his scientific expertise to explore recycled water solutions to improve our climate resilience.
Rising temperatures are certainly at the forefront of our minds as the thermometer begins to climb and we encourage staff and volunteers’ to monitor their exposure to heat and dehydration; but mornings in the Garden still offer a cool respite. It is a great time to visit and see our newest acquisition, an heirloom Chinese Wagon, a vintage John Deere in fact, which we acquired with support from Board Member, Fe (and Nancy) Tom; or to study the variety of heat-tolerant, heirloom summer crops we’re growing and learn about about traditional O'odham farming techniques with Assistant Gardener, Maegan Lopez and Ajo CSA (every third Thursday of the month); or witness the promise of an abundant fall harvest hidden amongst the shady leaves of our heritage fruit trees (hint: look for seating under the trees in the Spanish Colonial Orchard).
As we look forward to a more leisurely summer pace, a perfect culmination to the spring events occurred with the inauguration of the new Africa in the America’s Garden on Saturday June 4th. Volunteers and guests shared wonderful stories, food, music and dance to celebrate the newest addition to our timeline gardens.
Elsewhere in this quarterly update, staff share their reflections on the Garden and their aspirations for the future as we sow seeds in new garden spaces.
Please stay safe, hydrated and consider taking advantage of the cooler morning temperatures for a visit to the Garden this summer!
Julie Robinson, PhD
Executive Director
