When school reconvenes next week, kids participating in Tucson Unified School District's school garden program will have a new place to call home.
The Sprouts House Culinary Bungalows on North Mountain Road next to Mansfield Magnet Middle School will open to students and faculty beginning this week when they host professional development training for teachers. Classes will be held in one of the two renovated bungalows, which date back to the early 1920s-’30s.
The other bungalow houses a state-of-the-art community kitchen where students will prepare meals using food grown in the district's 20 school gardens. Some of that food will go back into district cafeterias, said Moses Thompson, director of the UA School Garden Workshop, a collaboration between the University of Arizona and TUSD that started in 2011.
Sprouts Healthy Communities Foundation, part of Sprouts Farmers Market, donated $1.1 million toward the $2.5 million cost of the Culinary Bungalows project, which includes Bobby's Garden. Private donations made up the bulk of the remaining costs, Thompson said.
The small garden was dedicated in mid-December to the late Bobby Gentry, an avid Tucson master gardener and home cook who died in January 2024.
Wiley Hundertmark, left, and Maria Celis, center, lead a group of TUSD students in planting an Asian pear tree at Bobby's Garden, part of the newly opened Sprouts House Culinary Bungalows.
Gentry's widow, Tucson publicist Norma Gentry, and son, Matt, raised $25,000 for the garden, which will be used to train UA student interns, Thompson said.
"For the students that go out and serve in those 20 school gardens, we now, for the first time, have our own kind of training center where we can give those students hands-on gardening experience, and then they'll go out and serve their internships in those schools," Thompson said.
Bobby's Garden and Sprouts House will become part of Mansfield's STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) program, Thompson said. Mansfield, which until now has not had a garden program, gets students from nearly a dozen schools who go on to attend the nearby Tucson High Magnet.
UA School Garden Workshop Director Moses Thompson, left, looks on as Matt Gentry places his father's ashes in the soil around a newly planted peach tree. Matt and his stepmother, Norma Gentry, raised more than $25,000 to support the Bobby Gentry Garden at the newly opened Sprouts House Culinary Bungalows across from Mansfield Magnet Middle School.
"We have maybe 10 or 11 elementary schools that have really robust school garden programs that all feed kids into Mansfield, and then most of the Mansfield kids end up going to Tucson High, and we have a really robust program at Tucson High," he explained. "Mansfield, for a long time, was the missing link in that (gardening) pipeline."
At the December dedication and ground-breaking, Matt Gentry sprinkled some of his father's ashes in the soil, where he and a half dozen interns and students planted several Mexican lime, mandarin orange, Meyer lemon, peach and Asian pear trees.
"Gardens are about people and community and Bobby had a love for community and people," said Tucson chef Janos Wilder, one of several chefs and representatives from the Tucson City of Gastronomy who spoke at the ceremony.
Ryan Clark, executive chef at Loews Ventana Canyon Resort, said he often used Meyer lemons and peppers from Bobby Gentry's garden, including habaneros that he turned into hot sauce for those attending the dedication event.
"I see the future of this garden growing not only vegetables and fruit, but stories," he said.
Thompson said work will begin in mid-January on building out the garden, which will eventually grow seasonal fruits and vegetables year-round.
"The cool months, we grow a lot of leafy greens and root vegetables. And then in the warm season months, we grow a lot of flowering and feeding vegetables like tomatoes, chiles, squash," said Thompson, who in 2006 was a founder of the internationally recognized garden program at Manzo Elementary School. He joined the UA School Garden Workshop as its director in 2015.
Work will also begin next week on a greenhouse at the back part of the garden and installing plumbing and irrigation, he said.
