Valencia County revives Meadow Lake, El Cerro Mission community gardens

East Valencia County’s community gardens are getting a new chance to serve families who need fresh food, youth programming and a place to learn practical skills close to home. Commissioners approved an agreement to revive the Meadow Lake and El Cerro Mission gardens, two east-side sites that had dwindled over the last couple of years even though they were built to help strengthen neighborhood food access.

Under the memorandum of understanding, Valencia County will provide the land and irrigation water, while Valencia Community Action Network will supply the labor to plant, maintain and organize the gardens. That arrangement gives the county a basic infrastructure role without making it run the gardens day to day, and it gives VCAN a stable base for the food and family services it already provides in Meadow Lake and El Cerro Mission.

VCAN Vice President Claudia Vargas told commissioners the nonprofit already runs two monthly food distributions and family craft nights. She said the gardens would fit into a broader support network for residents in the two communities, especially youth, Head Start families and seniors who still have agricultural knowledge to share. The group has also reached out to the Valencia County Cooperative Extension Service and its Master Gardeners, opening the door to gardening instruction, cooking classes and food preservation training.

The gardens are not starting from zero. A 2020 grant established urban community gardens in Meadow Lake and El Cerro Mission as part of the Eastern Valencia Urban Garden program, and earlier reports said the sites were already centered around two rapidly expanding community gardens at the Meadow Lake and El Cerro Mission community centers. Those efforts also had measurable output: youth farming interns donated more than 2,500 pounds of fresh produce to East Mesa families in 2020.

The revived gardens also have a visible local footprint. Community garden workdays were advertised for Fridays from 8 to 10 a.m. at the Meadow Lake Community Garden, 100 Cuerro Lane, and the El Cerro Mission Community Garden, 309 El Cerro Mission Road. Those locations put the project at the center of the neighborhoods it is meant to serve, not on the margins.

County Manager Jhonathan Aragon said the memorandum was lengthy and carefully crafted by the county’s legal team, and he described the deal as fair to everyone involved. With the county providing land and water and VCAN bringing the volunteer labor, the gardens now have a structure that could help determine whether they become a real east-side food resource again, not just a symbolic promise.