Soulful Seeds nurtures more than crops.
With a mission to foster connection and resilience through neighborhood gardens, Soulful Seeds has been providing healthy food to vulnerable populations in the Reno-Tahoe area since 2017. What began as a community garden at Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Reno evolved into a nonprofit organization in 2018. Today, Soulful Seeds oversees multiple USDA Certified People’s Gardens across the community.
With the support of a dedicated staff and board of directors, garden neighbors — organizations that house or are adjacent to Soulful Seeds’ facilities — work alongside public volunteers to maintain these thriving spaces. Every harvest is given back to the community at no cost. In 2024, Soulful Seeds distributed 6,591 pounds of food to garden neighbors and local pantries.
“We are committed to growing food and providing an opportunity to work in the gardens to the residents of our garden neighbors and others who might not have access to healthy food,” says Earstin Whitten, cofounder and board member of Soulful Seeds.
Growing Together
Soulful Seeds’ first garden at Saint Mary’s is a 1,000-square-foot space of raised beds that produces more than 1,000 pounds of fresh produce annually. The organization also operates a garden at Our Place, a three-acre urban oasis on a transitional housing campus for unhoused women and children, featuring 32 raised beds, an orchard, a crop field, and 5,400 square feet of covered growing space. Then there’s the urban orchard at CARE Chest, funded by the USDA Division of Urban Forestry, which provides fruit trees and berry bushes to a community in which 58 percent of residents rely on SNAP benefits.
“We grow many of the items you can see in the grocery store,” Whitten explains. “Our crops have included potatoes, tomatoes, onions, garlic, leeks, collard greens, lettuce, spinach, and much more. We have apples, pears, peaches, plums, apricots, cherries, and we just planted some blackberry bushes.”
Whitten says a key objective is to offer even more variety and volume of food products to the people they serve. To meet this goal, Soulful Seeds built three hoop houses at the garden at Our Place with the help of community volunteers.
“That’ll probably be the latter part of the spring, but as soon as the soil is workable, we plan on expanding the garden,” he adds. “This year is going to be a huge expansion year. For example, we have probably half of our growing area that’s not irrigated. We are going to get that irrigated and be able to plant at least three or four times more than what we have been planting. We are developing our own soil through composting, and we recycle a lot of green waste from local organizations to help in our effort, too.”
Highlighting Workforce Development and Mental Health
Cara Montoya, executive director of Soulful Seeds, recognizes that the organization’s impact extends far beyond providing nourishing food. In addition to managing its gardens and orchard, in 2024, Soulful Seeds planted 162 fruiting trees and plants in neighborhoods with low tree coverage. And the organization’s leaders are set to plant more fruit trees and bushes in underserved communities over the next five years, thanks to a USDA grant.”
“Part of that also is hiring and training arborist apprentices,” Montoya explains. “Not only are we providing food access and education, but we are a space where people can come and learn meaningful skills that help them to better their lives, and it also is great for the community. We are partnered with the May Arboretum Society to work closely with its arborists, and our apprentices do on-the-job shadowing at [the arboretum’s] sites as well as our growing spaces, so they’re getting a more varied, more detailed education from professionals that are licensed.”
Soulful Seeds embraces the therapeutic benefits of gardening, facilitating both group and one-on-one sessions with residents of Our Place and others in the community.
“Horticulture therapy is a newer modality of therapy, and research has shown that combining gardening activities with therapeutic modalities has been really beneficial for people,” Montoya says. “It’s really good for people’s mental health, and they tend to have better overall well-being than people who don’t engage in garden activities.”
Members of the team also work with trauma survivors in a beekeeping program.
“Intertwined into the beekeeping education are mindfulness techniques. In order to work with bees, to get them to stay relatively calm, you have to be relatively calm, and so a lot of people who have experienced trauma benefit from learning self-regulation skills this way,” Montoya says. “We provide a safe space for underserved sectors within our community to be able to come into the garden and learn a new skill. It’s also really great physical exercise. Honestly, providing food is just a bonus of what we get to do, but there’s a lot more that goes into these programs, including a strong sense of community, strength, and healing.”
For more details, visit Soulfulseedsnevada.org.
