Mission Garden inspires people to connect to this land by reclaiming agricultural traditions for our community in a changing world.
Mission Garden is one of the key projects of Friends of Tucson’s Birthplace, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization. Mission Garden’s multi-generational, outdoor, hands-on educational setting encourages interactive exchange of traditional knowledge gathered from diverse community elders and historical documents. By exclusively growing heritage crops and heirloom trees, we aspire to test, refine, and evaluate the practical wisdom of long-term arid-adapted agricultural practices. The basis of our educational template is to exchange and promote agricultural techniques that combine traditional knowledge with modern science.
With the help and participation of the Tucson community, we can continue to provide a window into the past, and inspire practical, local, agricultural methods throughout our semi-arid region. As the first UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy in the United States, we honor the agricultural contributions of the Sonoran Desert’s historic local cultures. Our mission in Tucson is to represent the deep history of multi-cultural regional food production, while mitigating food insecurities, resource depletion and the impacts of climate change.