By Gabriel Solis

Alfred Melbourne, founder and director of Three Sisters Gardens, believes that growing food brings life and opportunities to everyone. But it wasn’t something he realized as he was growing up in one of West Sacramento’s food deserts. 

Melbourne grew up in the city’s Broderick neighborhood, located in a designated food desert where access to fresh and nutritious food is lacking. It was also a place of poverty and with high rates of gang involvement. Melbourne learned to garden in his backyard with his stepdad and the two saw an opportunity to serve the community by growing food.

“Food is medicine that feeds a kid better, they’ll perform better, test scores go up, behavioral problems go down, it was just like, wow OK,” Melbourne says of the benefits of fresh food. 

Founded in 2018, Three Sisters Gardens is a nonprofit organization with four locations in West Sacramento that teaches youth how to garden using indigenous practices and provides food to local communities in designated food deserts. The gardens also host a variety of community events in order to bring people together.

Three Sisters Gardens donates food to 60-plus household communities around Broderick and an apartment complex called Las Casitas run by Yolo County Housing Authority.  

“We started with one small space — to create space — and then growing food, and it kinda just took over, [the] hustle mentality, you realizing there’s a problem and seeing [a] solution and doing the best we can,” Melbourne says. 

System of support 

 Melbourne hopes to inspire the youth in West Sacramento. With his team, he wants to create a community that can teach each other how to grow food and pass that knowledge on to even more people. 

“If any of our youth fails it’s because we failed them. … I’ve always wanted Three Sisters Gardens to be a space of learning and creating a system of support [rather] than just being a job,” Melbourne says. 

Three Sisters Garden provides volunteer and internship opportunities for youth where they can learn to garden. Danielle Dillard, life skills coach at Three Sisters Gardens explains the approach when guiding interns.

“We do pretty much hands-on learning so not only are the youth actually getting paid to do this work, but there’s also a learning component where if they don’t know that’s OK and we teach them things about the farm,” Dillard says, adding that youth get to experience other urban farms through field trips. “We’ll do the food is medicine, how this ties into general community change, and one of my biggest roles is making sure there is just the social, emotional and learning component within some of the stuff we do.” . 

Part of Melbourne’s mission with Three Sisters Gardens is to help pass down Indigenous knowledge and agricultural practices from Native people who came to Sacramento and looked after the land. As a member of the Fort Peck Assiniboine Sioux tribe, he wants the Native people to be remembered.

“Being Native, I always felt like the First Nations people don’t really get enough recognition, so relying on Indigenous knowledge and wisdom I wanted to bring it to the forefront,” Melbourne says. “ A lot of people think that this is how things have always been, but colonization has only been the last 525 years [but] Native people have been here thousands of years since time immemorial and during that time practices were used to grow with the land instead of against it.”

Centering indigenous practices 

Melbourne and members of Three Sisters Gardens start their day with a land acknowledgment of the First Nation Native people and teach visitors how to respect those practices,  such as using the Three Sisters technique while gardening.

Three Sisters Gardens is named after the technique, which utilizes companion planting with certain crops like corn, beans and squash that grow together and nurture each other like a family. Three Sisters Gardens grows up to 40 specialty crops, including tomatoes, cucumbers, celery, onions, carrots and a variety of native flowers. 

Melbourne says he prioritizes  maintaining healthy plots.

“Practicing smart farming … nowadays means using drip irrigation, cover cropping and crop rotating, so that we’re not overworking our soil,” he says. 

Simren Kaur, administrative coordinator at Three Sisters Gardens shares Melbourne’s belief in maintaining healthy land and using indigenous practices to meet that goal.

“I think the biggest thing is harmony. For so long we have been a part of this capitalist system, just a one sided extraction. It’s extracting from the land and it’s the reason we are facing a climate crisis,” she says. “[Melbourne] dreams big and it’s kinda nice. It’s like an inspiring way to set the course of the organization.”

Melbourne says future goals for Three Sisters Gardens include  a community center that can hold indoor events, multicultural educational spaces, commercial kitchens and retail space to sell the food and flowers they grow. In order to meet that goal they will need to raise $5 million to open and 4-5 years of operation. Melbourne shares what he hopes Three Sisters Gardens will continue to do for the youth.

“I always wanted to enjoin people in our collective manifestation and vision of our community and just spark people’s imagination to what they can do for themselves and their community,” Melbourne says. 

This story was written and photographed by Gabriel Solis, a student at Sacramento City College.
This story is part of the Solving Sacramento journalism collaborative. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, Capital Public Radio, Outword, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review, Sacramento Observer and Univision 19. Support stories like these here, and sign up for our monthly newsletter.