Community Gardens

Milagro was designed with permaculture values in mind and so our community’s landscaping includes a variety of fruit trees.

Stewards of the Desert

Our landscape committee cares for the trees along with the homeowners, and the fruit is available in season for all residents to share. The productive trees include many citrus (orange, grapefruit, tangerine, meyer lemon, and lime) and, also, pomegranate and fig trees.

We also have some native desert plants like palo verde, mesquite, and prickly pear that produce edibles.

In the midst of this desert environment it is exciting to see that careful stewardship of water can make it possible to grow this wonderful variety of food plants, as most water for the trees is recycled from our homes, though supplemental water is needed during the hot summer months.

Communal Gardens

Growing vegetables is challenging in Tucson’s arid climate. Although food can be grown year round, hot weather gardens require frequent watering. In the cooler months we plant lettuce, broccoli, kale, chard, spinach, arugula, carrots, radishes, beets, garlic, onions and peas. We've discovered that our children especially love to pull and eat carrots.

In hot weather, we have experimented with squash, beans, eggplant, tomatoes, peppers and melons.

We have a small herb garden in which we grow parsley, chives, oregano, cilantro, basil, thyme, etc.

In gardening there’s always something new to try, and no doubt we will continue to experiment with new crops and new varieties, as well as with seed saving.

We garden organically, using compost created from food and garden scraps at Milagro, and compost from a local horse and chicken farm to enrich the soil.

We've installed a drip irrigation system in our garden to make watering as efficient as possible.

Our gardens' bounty is available for use by individuals, families and our community meal cooking teams.