When Sol Mercado was incarcerated, one of her few sources of comfort was to dig her hands into dirt. Coming from a family of sugarcane and coffee farm workers in Puerto Rico, a love of gardening was in her roots. But it wasn’t until she was in prison and started participating in a gardening program that she truly connected with this part of her heritage.

“It’s a huge coping skill to be working with the soil, planting stuff and seeing it grow,” she said.

Mercado – who was released a year and a half ago – now works for Planting Justice, a food justice organization based in Oakland, California, that tackles inequalities in the industrialized food system, from the underpayment of food workers to the lack of fresh produce in low-income neighborhoods.

Planting Justice addresses food sovereignty with marginalized communities – in particular people who have been affected by the criminal justice system – through gardening workshops in prisons and jails, such as San Quentin state prison, and jobs for those formerly incarcerated.

For Mercado, 36, the organization helped turn her life around. After becoming involved with gangs as a teen in the northern California city of Pittsburg, she was arrested at 19 and spent the next 16 years behind bars. She was paroled in December 2020, and almost immediately started working with Planting Justice. Now, she has her own apartment, car – and a new baby.

Mercado said she now looks at gardening as an analogy for her own life.

“What I learned in prison is that if I want to change, if I want to blossom, I need to work on myself and remove unhealthy things from my life,” she said. “It’s the same as a plant. A plant, if you don’t weed it, if you don’t prune it, if you don’t water it, it’s not going to grow and give fruit.”

Planting Justice’s two-acre (nearly 1 hectare) nursery – which grows more than 1,200 varieties of plants – is tucked between a busy highway and a railroad line in Sobrante Park, a low-income, predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood that’s long been a food desert with no grocery stores within walking distance. The land the nursery sits on once belonged to the Indigenous Ohlone people, so Planting Justice is working with the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, a local organization that helps facilitate the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people; once the transfer is complete, Planting Justice will lease the land from them.

Founded in 2009, Planting Justice has installed 550 edible gardens at schools, community centers and homes; hosts education programs for local youth; distributes produce to local residents; gives away free fruit smoothies at Bay Area Rapid Transit stations; and sources produce for the Good Table, a nearby cafe where diners pay what they can afford.

As part of a new initiative that started this year, Planting Justice is also planting 1,000 fruit trees – apple, pear, pomegranate, peach, olive and fig trees – in East Oakland homes for free.

Like Mercado, many Planting Justice employees were formerly incarcerated. Some came to the organization through re-entry programs and partnerships in jails and prisons, while others found their way after their release. Planting Justice says its recidivism rate is 2%, far lower than California’s rate of nearly 50%. Maya Salsedo, Planting Justice’s education program director, said that through this work, she has come to see that the injustices in the food system and mass incarceration are often the same.

“Folks’ race, class, gender, their exclusion from traditional workforces, physical geography and citizenship status shape how a person will interact with the carceral system and policing,” she said. “And those are the same exact factors that determine how people will interact with our food system, whether they’re a service worker who can’t afford to feed their family, or they’re someone eating farm-to-table dinners. Those intersectional oppressions are the same.”

Classes inside jails and prisons focus on topics such as water, waste, permaculture and green jobs. And through hands-on gardening workshops, Salsedo said she has planted lavender, mint, lemon balm, sage, jasmine, as well as medicinal plants and fruit trees on or bordering prison grounds. Although classes have been put on hold because of the pandemic and other restrictions,there’s a strong desire for these programs, she said – during incarceration, touching a plant can be a rare experience – and some try to grow plants on their own, like sprouting apple seeds on the prison patios.

Bilal Coleman said he first heard about Planting Justice while incarcerated at San Quentin state prison, north of San Francisco. He was coming to the end of his 20-year sentence and was participating in a partner program called Insight Garden – and Planting Justice was advertising that it was hiring people returning home to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Coleman said that gardening is in his roots. “Ever since I can remember, there’s been a garden in my family,” he said. But that wasn’t the immediate draw to Planting Justice; it was the security of having a job lined up after his parole, benefits and good pay – salaries start at $19 an hour. “It was a chance to get on my feet before I actually paroled,” he said. “It made a lot of things a lot more successful in my transition.” He paroled in 2015 and has been with Planting Justice since.

Coleman said he had worked almost every job that Planting Justice has, and now focuses on youth education. He started a culinary program for underserved high school students that pays for them to become certified food handlers, which he said can lead to entrepreneurial opportunities and also deters young people from getting involved with gangs. “Giving them something that’s tangible, in my opinion, lessens that,” he said. “And will give you an opportunity to maybe not get in that car because you had something else you have to do: you have purpose.”

Planting Justice’s presence can be felt throughout Sobrante Park, revitalizing a neighborhood that’s long been in decline. Sobrante Park has been “underresourced and overpenalized for generations, where there aren’t the same food options,” said Julia Toro, nursery office manager.

Covonne Page, Planting Justice’s land team lead, was born and raised here, and recalls a time when things were different. The 33-year-old said that he and his friends would ride inflatable rafts on the San Leandro Creek, which was lined with wild blackberry bushes and filled with lizards and turtles. Most houses had fruit trees and vegetable gardens in the back yard, and families would trade their harvest so that everyone had their fill of oranges, loquats, lemons and plums. This bounty meant the community ate well; Page remembers his grandmother’s blackberry cobbler and his grandfather’s plum jam.

“It also gave more of a sense of community,” Page said. “People were saying, ‘Oh, come pick some of the lemons out of my yard’, or ‘Come get them before they hit the ground.’”

But years of disinvestment, longtime residents leaving – often for prison – and environmental degradation have decimated this landscape, Page said. Today, the creek has dried up, the blackberries have disappeared and most of the old fruit trees have been cut down. 

By bringing fruit trees back to people’s yards and teaching them how to garden, Planting Justice is not only offering much-needed jobs to the community; it’s revitalizing its food culture and sovereignty. “I watched this place go downhill,” Page said. “Planting Justice is one of the only positive things going on.”

For Mercado, Planting Justice has given a new sense of home.

“There’s no boundaries here,” she said while standing among rows of strawberries and leafy greens. “In prison, they’d say, ‘You can’t go over there.’ Nah, here, I feel free. I’m finally free.”