Ukiah’s State Street Garden closes June 30

UKIAH, CA., 5/28/26 — The nearly 20-year-old community garden on the corner of 755 South State Street in Ukiah is effectively closed. A sign from its operator, the nonprofit North Coast Opportunities, went up May 8, and the water was shut off 15 days later. Longtime gardeners, their spring crops in the ground, have until the end of June to remove plants, belongings and whatever crops they can salvage. They had no notice of the garden’s end until the closure sign was posted.

The program’s founder said the original landowner agreement gave 90 days notice before any shutdown, with time built in for gardeners to bring in their crops. NCO gave 15 days.

The sign at the site reads, in English and Spanish: “This closure is at the request of the property owner.” It gives a last day of June 30, 2026, warns that anything left behind will be removed and carries the phone number for North Coast Opportunities, the Ukiah nonprofit that ran the State Street Garden as part of its Gardens Project program.

NCO confirmed the closure in a May 27 phone interview with Chief Community Impact Officer Tiffany Gibson, who said the lease ended at the property owner’s request and that NCO has been asked to clear the site. Gibson said she did not have a specific replacement plot to offer the displaced gardeners: “I don’t have a specific open new plot of land that I can offer at this time.” Asked why the property owner ended the lease, Gibson said, “I think you should probably speak with them, and I hate to put words in their mouth.”

The property owner declined to comment for this story. 

Marin Morales, a longtime gardener at the State Street site, said NCO staff gave him a different reason for the closure than the one on the sign. “That’s what they say in the office: it’s a lot of money for the water bill, and they’re not making money to pay,” Morales said in a May 27 phone interview, adding that he understood NCO’s government funding had also tightened.

He said the timing caught gardeners off guard — “one day to another day” — and that some had already put in summer tomatoes and peppers that won’t make it to harvest. His own onions are in, but neighboring plots will lose their crops. He has no other plot lined up: “I don’t have a place.” Morales said that when other gardeners pressed NCO staff about what was next, they were told the office did not know whether more gardens would close.

Mendocino County Board of Supervisor Maureen Mulheren, who represents Ukiah, said she had not been told of the closure before it happened. “I was not made aware of this change before it happened,” Mulheren wrote in an email Thursday morning. She said she was “trying to get in touch with someone at the NCO Gardens Project to better understand why this decision was made.”

The garden’s beginning

Miles Gordon founded the NCO Gardens Project in 2007 and ran it for a decade before leaving NCO in 2017. In a May 27 interview, he said the standard landowner agreement he drafted for the program included a 90-day termination clause, with a 30-day window to cure any violation before the 90 days began running. He picked 90 days on purpose, he said: long enough for gardeners to bring in a typical harvest if an agreement ended.

The original term, he said, was five years with automatic five-year renewals.

“It sounds like maybe they didn’t follow the last part of it,” Gordon said. “Ninety days, 30 days to fix it, and 90 days, so if there were crops planted, 90 days was a typical harvest period.”

The owners of 755 South State, Gordon said, were “very generous” with the garden the whole time he was there. They donated the land and the water for at least the first eight years of his tenure. The property has not changed hands since Gordon set up the arrangement.

Rumors about town are that high water bills precipitated the closure. Asked about this, Gordon said that if water costs eventually became an issue between NCO and the property owners, the original agreement had room for that too.

During his time running the program, gardeners paid annual plot fees of $30 to $40 a season toward site maintenance. “If the owner eventually said, `Hey, I want to be paid back for the amount of water,’ there was always a mechanism to raise the garden fees to help with that,” Gordon said. It is not clear whether the agreement Gordon drafted still governed the State Street site this May.

Asked how the closure was handled, Gordon noted: “how it ended could have been handled differently.”

The State Street closure is not the first NCO program to go down quietly, Gordon said. Two former NCO programs, the Farmers’ Convergence and the Food Policy Council, have moved to the School of Adaptive Agriculture, a Mendocino County nonprofit where Gordon now sits on the board. The School of Adaptive Agriculture was an NCO project itself before it spun out. Neither handoff was announced publicly, Gordon said, and that has left a coordination gap among the county’s food-systems organizations.

Carole Brodsky, a Ukiah Daily Journal contributor who has covered NCO for more than a decade and wrote the original profiles of the NCO Gardens Project in 2012 and 2013, said the program was once much larger than it is now. During Gordon’s tenure, Brodsky said, the project ran “literally dozens of gardens, not just in Ukiah but all over inland Mendocino,” and has “gradually reduced in size over the years.” 

The State Street parcel sits in Ukiah’s south-end services corridor, two doors north of the Mendocino County Homeless Continuum of Care offices and down the street from Redwood Community Services. Under the city’s 2040 General Plan, the parcel is zoned Community Commercial, with multi-family infill allowed at 28 to 40 dwelling units per acre. No public planning or building application for the parcel has surfaced.

The gardeners, some of them seniors, have until June 30 to take everything out: fencing, irrigation, cactus, plants, beds and furniture. The sign tells them to take their trash too.