Vandals destroy produce at Petaluma community garden

A group of Petaluma gardeners is lamenting the loss of a summer’s bounty after vandals ransacked the Sunrise Community Garden in an “insane food fight” earlier this month, leaving smashed fruits and vegetables impaled in the fence and wasted on the ground.

Mary Fairow discovered the devastation the morning of Sept. 17 when she arrived for a monthly workday at the small patch on Sunrise Parkway and North McDowell Boulevard. With a heavy heart, she led crews in the cleanup of the facility, composting the destroyed produce for future use in the garden’s 20 plots.

“It’s disappointing, and they probably don’t realize the amount of effort that goes into tending a garden to get to the point that it has that type of bounty,” said Fairow, whose own tomatoes were a casualty of the vandalism.

The exact amount of produce lost and the associated monetary value isn’t known, she said.

The east side community garden, which is protected by a fence, a locked gate and motion detectors, has experienced issues with trespassing several other times this summer, and gardeners have found displaced vegetables, discarded beer bottles, trash and cigarette butts in the area, according to longtime member Deanna Statler.

Police reports have not been filed and the perpetrators remain at large, leaving gardeners frustrated and searching for a motive, she said.

Each year, garden members donate hundreds of pounds of fruits and vegetables to the Mary Isaak Center and they also leave offerings of freshly-picked food outside the garden for passersby, Statler said.

“Everyone in the garden is very generous with sharing the produce with each other and also the neighborhood,” she said. “It’s so sad to hear that someone had come in and had just wasted all this produce.”

The community garden on the city-owned property sprouted up in 2011 through a partnership with the city of Petaluma and St. Joseph Health, and is currently under the umbrella of Petaluma Bounty, according to Bounty program director Suzi Grady.

She said the garden, which serves as an educational hub that also beautifies the neighborhood, helps support healthy eating for the area residents who might not otherwise have the opportunity to grow their own food.

Grady said she wasn’t aware of any similar incidents reported at the handful of other community gardens in Petaluma during the past few weeks. However, she said vandalism isn’t uncommon at community gardens, pointing out a 2011 incident where a tractor and several other items disappeared from the Bounty Farm, as well as a smattering of other minor thefts that take place at the 3-acre farm “fairly regularly.”

Though she hadn’t heard about the recent incident at Sunrise Community Garden, she said she plans to reach out to the members to find ways to help. She encouraged collaboration with the community and the police department as well as measures like posting signs or asking neighbors to keep a look out.

“There is no one solution to prevent this from happening again, but it’s important to allow ourselves to have that emotional response and frustration and to not act on those emotions to shut the garden down from public engagement,” she said. “The majority of people who come and go love it and appreciate it. … You can’t let a few bad apples spoil the whole bunch.”

(Contact Hannah Beausang at hannah.beausang@arguscourier.com. On Twitter @hannahbeausang.)