‘It’s good for all of us’
Chris Montesano is gardening to save the planet – one garden bed at a time
Chris Montesano knows exactly where his love of gardening began — with the pole beans in his family’s vegetable patch.
As a little boy growing up near Vallejo, he loved the hours he and his mother spent digging in the dirt, training the vines, collecting the beans all summer long and preparing a bag full to be planted the following spring.
More than 70 years later, Montesano still grows the same vines every year, a variety that his family brought with them from the Calabrese region of Southern Italy. He always plants a row or two right next to his grandfather’s tomatoes and more than a dozen other fruits and vegetables packed tightly in his front yard garden in downtown Sonora.
“They’re delicious,” he said, reaching up to check the ripening pods. They’re also hearty and do fairly well in early spring in Sonora. That heritage, along with seven decades of gardening know-how, is what Montesano now shares with his community as a volunteer with the Tuolumne County Blue Zones Project.
His popular workshops focus on year-round, bio-intensive, organic gardening techniques for small, home gardens here in the Sierra foothills. He covers planting layout, crop rotation, soil building, composting, seed saving and information on varietals that do well in the foothill climate. Most importantly, he just enjoys sharing his enthusiasm about all the benefits of growing your own food and the local impact it can have on health, air quality and climate change.
“It’s amazing what you can do with just a garden,” he said. “If I can get just 107 people to garden 200 square feet yearround, that will remove one ton of carbon dioxide every year from our air. It gets you outside moving, you grow good food and it’s good for our local environment. It’s good for all of us.”
Montesano’s knowledge, experience and approach were a perfect fit for the local Blue Zones Project, a four-year effort to improve community health in Tuolumne County using global research and findings on longevity and healthy lifestyle.
“Chris is so unassuming and engaging,” Judy Stoltenberg, marketing and engagement lead for Tuolumne County Blue Zones Project, said. “He came into our office about a year ago to learn more about our project right after our kickoff. He is just mesmerizing with what he shares and how he shares it.”
Stoltenberg and the Blue Zones Project team quickly signed Montesano as a volunteer.
At age 77, Montesano is a living example of Blue Zones’ core findings — the connections of healthy living, healthy eating, and the rewards of volunteering
and spending time outdoors every day. Gardening brings it all together, Montesano believes, and he’s excited to have a whole new network of people interested in the same goals.
While Montesano never studied agriculture or had any formal training, he has gardened his whole life. It was always a common thread, connecting his lifelong dedication to local action and compassionate human service, as well as
his growing concern over climate change and its impact on communities everywhere. He has charted the increase in temperatures locally, experiencing first-hand the change in his ability to grow certain varietals in his garden as the result of longer, hotter summers. He’s passionate about what he’s learning, and motivated to keep sharing.
Montesano’s gardening education started in childhood, with his parents and grandparents. They were Italian immigrants who had a grocery store in Crockett and a big family garden to help feed their extended family.
Montesano joined the Christian Brother’s Order for five years and attended their college, Saint Mary’s, in the Bay Area, where he studied Theology and Psychology. After he left the Christian Brothers, he moved to New York City to join the Catholic Worker Movement and volunteer at the Catholic Worker’s urban home in New York City. This was during the Vietnam War era.
As a pacifist, Montesano was seeking a place to serve as a conscientious objector to the war, and the Catholic Workers movement offered a good option. The New York home was located in an impoverished inner-city neighborhood, providing people with shelter, meals and assistance. Montesano had found his life’s work — making a daily difference in the lives of people who were struggling. After a couple of years, he returned to the Bay Area to help establish another urban home in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District.
There, he met his wife, Joan, and they married and started a family. Several years later, they packed up the children and started a very different project — they purchased 80 acres near Sheep Ranch in Calaveras County, and began building a Catholic Worker farming community that they would run for nearly 40 years.
As they gradually developed the farm with the goal of making it a self-sufficient operation, it served as a safe home and retreat for all kinds of people in need, from AIDS patients in the 1980s, to people in recovery to developmentally disabled adults and their families.
People who stay at the farm are always invited to help with gardening and animal care as part of their time there, so they saw first-hand the healing impact this activity had on people from all walks of life.
Chris and Joan Montesano, who was also a longtime medical social worker in Tuolumne County, ran the farm themselves for decades. They moved to Sonora to retire 12 years ago, and a few years ago donated the farm to Canticle Farm, an urban Catholic Worker community that gardened in the city and was looking for a rural farm.
Retirement gives Chris Montesano more time to pursue his interest in gardening. He experiments constantly and enjoys the process of trial-and-error. He specially enjoys engaging with other gardeners, trading seeds and sharing tips and techniques for successful crops and crop rotations.
“It’s infectious,” he said. “I find people who love gardening as much as I do. There’s so much to learn, and the more you learn, the better you do.”
Connecting with Blue Zones Project has expanded Chris Montesano’s network exponentially, allowing him to meet gardeners of all skill levels, both in his own community and beyond. With the success of his workshops, he has been invited to work with different groups, including two local tribes that are developing community gardens. Tribal elders involved in the project are very knowledgeable, he said, and are sharing traditional methods for organic pest control and protecting crops in temperature swings.
Chris Montesano himself has been building his knowledge and skill with bio-intensive gardening. He recently began the online course “Organic Vegetable Gardening” by nationally known gardening expert Joe Lamp’l.
Lamp’l is the Joe behind the nomenclature “Joe Gardner” on the popular PBS series “Growing a Greener World.” Chris Montesano qualified for a scholarship for the program, and his instructors are pleased to see him bringing what he learns to his Blue Zones Project workshops.
The course, he said, has deepened his understanding of gardening’s environmental benefits. While he and Joan were always committed to organic gardening at the farm, he is now adding in many more advanced techniques. The goal is to improve soil condition, reduce pests and grow a wide variety of fruits and vegetables in a compact space on a year-round basis. He plots out the space and planting sequence, rotating crops in a specific four-year cycle designed to replenish and build the soil, and experimenting with the combinations and planting schedules to adapt to the changing climate of the Sierra foothills.
He’s currently trying Chinese red noodle beans, California black-eyed peas and sweet potatoes as more heat tolerant crops. He’s also growing Tokyo bunching onions and Swiss chard as some of the few crops that can take both freezing temperatures as well as survive in 100-plus-degree temperatures.
“There isn’t just one way to garden,” he said. “You need to discern what works for where you are and what’s happening now and find a balance.”
The rotation needs to move from legumes to leafy greens to fruiting plants and root crops, which each use different nutrients from the soil and impact aspects of soil health.
Chris Montesano covers all this in his Blue Zones Project workshop series and is encouraged by the interest of the community.
“Chris’s workshops are just a treasure,” Stoltenberg said. “We’re so lucky to have his expertise and that he sees the value in volunteering to share.”
Community member and culinary educator Ismael Canizalez took Chris Montesano’s class when he first moved to the county, and found it a fantastic way to connect in his new community.
“Chris makes his classes fun for everyone, and he has this ability to make you feel comfortable and confident in learning something new,” Canizalez said. “He covers everything from beginning to end… and he focuses on the specific situations each person is dealing with here in our area. That’s really important in horticulture, and he has such extensive experience growing here. We need to learn from him if we’re going to be a more resilient community.”
Canizalez, a project manager for the Chicken Ranch Rancheria of Mewuk Indians of California, has gone on to be a Blue Zones volunteer himself, leading community cooking classes at the rancheria’s new cultural center and at other sites. As volunteers, Canizalez said, he and Chris Montesano are able to be proactive in promoting health and well-being locally.
Chris Montesano agreed, and said he’s especially interested in teaching young people that gardening is an effective local action in many ways. Bio-intensive techniques, like crop rotation and composting capture carbon dioxide in the soil, replace the need for fertilizers and reduce the need to transport food and waste. And growing your own food locally makes people more self-reliant.
“I think it’s crucial that they learn this, and that they see this is something they can do for themselves,” he said. “It’s an action we each can take and it will have an impact here in our community.”