Mesa’s Urban Farm Turned a Parking Lot Into 500 Pounds of Produce a Month, and It Needs Volunteers Three Mornings a Week

Behind a brick wall on Broadway Road, just south of downtown Mesa, there is a small farm where bananas have grown right over the wall, where bitter melon, moringa and borage grow among the vegetables, and where kitchen scraps from a dining room go back into the soil as compost. Every month it sends about 500 pounds of fresh produce next door to the St. Vincent de Paul Mesa Dining Room, which serves lunch to some of the community’s most vulnerable residents.

The Mesa Urban Farm, at 67 W. Broadway Road, runs on volunteers, and it is open to them three mornings a week. Shifts run Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 7 to 10 a.m., which puts the next ones on Saturday, Oct. 24, Tuesday, Oct. 27, and Thursday, Oct. 29. The Society of St. Vincent de Paul (SVdP), the Phoenix-based Catholic charity that runs the farm, asks for a minimum of two hours per shift and notes that hours may vary by season.

With mornings finally cooling off in the Valley, it is a comfortable season to try a shift. The work on SVdP’s list is the kind most home gardeners already know: preparing seedlings, planting new crops, trellising, weeding, pruning, watering and harvesting. There is also irrigation maintenance, pest management, light construction and plenty of shoveling, digging and raking.

From a parking lot to a farm

The farm did not start as much. According to a 2022 profile published by SVdP, two volunteers, Mary Ann Ricketts and Margot Jauregui, looked at a barren parking lot beside the Mesa Dining Room and saw a garden. It began with a donated semi-truck load of pine mulch.

Ricketts, a retired nurse who lives in Chandler, had no background in gardening or urban farming, the profile says, but she knew how to organize people and projects. “We started planting, just basic salad things,” she told SVdP. “Then we’d make salad. Go up where the people sat, and we’d say, ‘We’re growing this do you want to help us?’”

In the early days, Ricketts and Jauregui were there seven days a week with volunteers. They worked alongside dining room guests, and the profile says the experience helped about 18 of those guests find full-time employment and stability. Over the years the farm added shade structures, 48 raised beds, a cactus garden, flowers and planters, and composting that uses food waste from the dining room.

“Mary Ann is one of the most dedicated volunteers I’ve known in my five plus years at SVdP,” Jessica Berg, SVdP’s chief program officer, said in the profile. “In short, we absolutely would not have a Mesa farm without her.”

SVdP’s location page says the farm started in 2015 and covers 3,000 square feet. In April, it marked its 10-year anniversary when U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton presented a Congressional Commendation to the farm team on April 9. Ricketts accepted it as the farm’s founder. “I humbly accept this award on behalf of literally thousands of volunteers who have helped us build this garden of Eden, in a food desert, in an industrialized area of Mesa, over the past 11 years,” she said, according to SVdP’s account of the event.

Bananas in the desert

Mesa’s farm is the smallest of SVdP’s three urban farms, but it has a reputation for growing things that are not supposed to do well here. SVdP lists bitter melon, banana trees, moringa and borage among its rare crops and fruit trees, and its April article mentions persimmons, bananas and papayas.

“What’s most extraordinary about this place is the things they get to grow here in the desert. Fruits and produce that are huge and are not supposed to grow in Arizona,” Shannon Clancy, SVdP’s Rob and Melani Walton Endowed CEO, said at the anniversary event.

The bananas have their own story. In July 2024, SVdP wrote about a bunch that had crept over the farm’s brick wall and grown through the fencing, right above a mural that reads, “We don’t know each other, but we need each other.” Ka-Linda Blackner, the farm’s program coordinator, had never grown bananas before. “I didn’t think they would survive, but I was up for the challenge,” she said. “And six months later, the bananas were ready to eat.”

Blackner sees the farm as more than a production plot. “There is a lot of healing going on in the farm,” she told SVdP. Harvested produce is served to guests in the dining room or sent home with them in bags to eat later.

Part of a Valley-wide program

The Mesa farm is one piece of SVdP’s Urban Farm Program, which began in 2012 with a farm at the Human Services Campus in downtown Phoenix. The program now includes three farms, each tied to one of the charity’s five dining rooms in Maricopa County. SVdP says it uses permaculture and chemical-free methods, and its program page lists 26,413 pounds of produce harvested and more than 8,600 hours of volunteer service.

The farms also teach. SVdP lists classes on permaculture practices, seed starting and basic beekeeping, a Master Gardener “Garden in a Box” program, and a Junior Gardener program and chicken care for kids. It has also published an SVdP Urban Farms Best Practices Manual, which it describes as a general reference guide for urban farmers in the greater Phoenix area, covering daily operations, which plants to grow, soil science, fertilizer, compost, irrigation and ecological farming practices. Home gardeners working with the same heat and soil may find it useful, whether or not they ever volunteer.

How to sign up

Volunteers start by filling out SVdP’s volunteer interest form at stvincentdepaul.net or by scheduling a shift through the charity’s volunteer portal, where the Mesa Urban Farm has its own project page. SVdP says a volunteer scheduler will reach out within two business days to set a date and share parking instructions and clothing suggestions. Questions go to volunteer@svdpaz.org or 602-261-6886.

SVdP’s guidelines say volunteers 14 and older can serve on their own, and children younger than 14 must volunteer alongside an adult for the whole shift. The charity asks for closed-toe shoes with rubber soles and knee-length shorts, skirts or pants, and no tank, halter or tube tops. Hats, long pants and long-sleeved shirts are recommended, along with a refillable water bottle.

When you arrive, parking is inside the gate at the Mesa Dining Room; SVdP says to check with the security guard to have the gate opened. A volunteer listing SVdP posted through HandsOn Connect notes that the farm has shade structures and an air-conditioned area for cooling off, and that dining room guests, many of whom are unsheltered, are likely to be on site.

Groups are welcome, and the work changes with the season. Some mornings it is harvesting and preparing produce for the kitchen. Other mornings it is shoveling compost, fixing irrigation lines or raking out a bed for the next planting. Either way, what gets picked that morning can be on a plate in the dining room a few steps away.