Community Plant Giveaway
Our Community Connectors are always working hard to ensure our neighbors have opportunities to access gardens and grow their own plants. On May 14, we hosted a Community Plant Giveaway and invited all of our gardeners to pick up their orders of tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers, cucumbers, kale, cabbage, onions, and cilantro. Our volunteers were a big assist in keeping the day orderly and on-track! These moments of giving always resonate deeply with our commitment to build local food sovereignty; we are dedicated to empowering sustainable and organic food production in our community.
Three of our community connectors: Noemi, Wendy, and Antonio (left to right)
Our community gardens reach over 150 families throughout Northfield and Faribault. Noemi Carreon is the program manager for the Community Connectors, a team of 5 intercultural leaders with strong relationships within the communities we serve. Our connectors maintain our gardens, teach traditional and sustainable growing practices, and connect our neighbors to gardens near their home. Investing in our community networks gives us the insight and ability to expand our reach in meaningful ways.
The first half of the day, we congregated at the Sharing Our Roots community garden to handoff plants to our gardeners in the Northfield area. Twin Organics, a local organic Northfield farm, dropped off our huge haul of vegetables— and just like that, we went to work unloading and sorting hundreds of plants. Thankfully, our wonderful volunteers helped us label and organize each order so everyone received the correct plants.
Carla (volunteer from Blue Cross Blue Shield) and Virginia (SOR board president) seperating plants and prepping orders.
By 3pm, we moved our operation over to the Canon River Park garden. From tiny babies to elders, our gardeners showed up with happy faces and open hands. There was a palpable excitement from everyone to start planting and kick off the 2026 growing season.
Our gardeners were so excited to get planting, connector Elkanah carved out time to finish tilling the garden!
It was such a lovely day to spend time with our gardeners and their families. Our gardens are now ready to sow and everyone is over the moon to transplant their new starters! With such friendly & committed growers, we are overjoyed to support their passion to cultivate fresh, culturally-relevant foods for themselves, families, and communities.
Facilitators from UMN Extension handing out resources on mental health and conducting surveys.
We also know that many of our gardeners enjoy these spaces because they are places of joy, relaxation, and fulfillment. We wanted to learn more about about ways to support their mental health so we had UMN Extension mental health professionals attend the gathering. They provided resources on mental health and conducted accessible surveys, using beads, to measure what type of help our gardeners wanted. We plan to use these results to create a more robust curriculum with relevant tools to continue supporting our gardeners’ mental health in meaningful ways.
Sharing Our Roots deeply values these opportunities to serve and connect to the wider community. If you would like to come out the farm and see our programming in action, contact info@sharing-our-roots.org.
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Sharing Our Roots relies on community donations to fund our work restoring land and providing immigrant, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ farmers with essential support. If you are able and inspired, please join us in our work to heal our lands and prepare emerging farmers by contributing a one-time or recurring donation. Thank you!
