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Editor’s note: Community Garden Week was March 31-April 6, 2025 (but it’s not too late to visit the garden).
Meet Robin Pollard, who has kept the Community Garden at Vista Park Hill in Hollister open to the public since 1999.
“It’s my playground,” Pollard said. “I love playing in the dirt. If you expose yourself to healthy soils, you’re doing your body well.”
Currently, Pollard’s harvesting her winter crops including cabbage, broccoli, and three types of kale. “I like kale chips,” she said. For summer, she is getting ready to plant tomatoes, peppers, carrots, squash and corn.
Pollard started the garden 26 years ago, saying she wanted to have an impact on Vista Park Hill, the neighborhood where she lived.
“The lot that is now the community garden,” she said, “was full of weeds and trash that blew into my yard.”
Pollard said she traveled to the East Coast and Europe before she began her project.
“I saw many community gardens and I thought, ‘What a great sight!’ I’d never really seen many here in California. So, I just went up there and started gardening and offering people plots.”
Pollard said Hollister eventually granted permission for her to be in the park. Because of the area’s reputation as a homeless encampment at the time, she worked to make people comfortable being at the site.
“I went up there and started digging and cleaning up,” Pollard said. “At first, it was letting people know they could come up there, but I wanted to make sure they wanted to come back each season.”
The goal was to get people up on the hill so they would have a beautiful place to take in the town.
“There’s really no finer place than Park Hill to enjoy the vistas of Hollister,” she said.
Another goal was to allow individuals and organizations like Growing Hearts to have plots to grow whatever they like.
“I have met many people here,” Pollard said. “Lots of neighbors, as well as people that just want to have their own piece of dirt to work in.”
The number of plots varies from year to year, Pollard said, but there has always been active participation.
“I would say there’s probably usually 12 or 15 plots every year,” she said. “And some of those families have four or five people that come up and work.”
Pollard said she thinks every neighborhood should have a community garden.
“We get a lot of fresh food already,” she said. “We’re spoiled with having our agriculture so close, but the opportunity to get in the dirt is really valuable and is a health benefit.”
The Community Garden is located at: 420 Hill Street, Hollister.
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