A Look Inside Land Together's In-Prison Programs: Gardens, Curriculum, and Community
Some noteworthy moments from our prison programs this month:
Lancaster State Prison
Land Together's year-long in-prison curriculum goes deep. Alongside hands-on permaculture, landscape design, ecoliteracy, and ecotherapy, participants move through an intensive social and emotional learning journey that is just as central to the work as anything grown in the soil. Self-awareness, understanding how our experiences shape us and clarifying our values, beliefs, and boundaries, is foundational to healing and growth. Through our inner gardening curriculum, supportive staff, and intentional spaces, participants are empowered to know and love themselves while taking accountability for their actions.
What that looks like in practice:
Earlier this month at Lancaster State Prison, we explored our Tree of Trauma framework together. Looking at the image as a group, we talked about roots: how adverse cultural and community experiences shape childhood, and how what lives beneath the surface influences what grows above.
One participant shared that while the framework offers language and context, it cannot fully hold the emotional weight of lived experience. Another reflected on how ICE raids are becoming new roots of trauma for children today.
The tree gives language to what is often invisible.
Earlier in the session, we were in the garden mulching, weeding, watering, and relocating agave. The work mirrored the lesson. Composting reminds us that what breaks down can become nourishment. Weeding asks us to remove what no longer serves. Pruning teaches that growth sometimes requires letting go.
The garden is not separate from the conversation. It is the conversation.
This is what we mean when we talk about tending our inner and outer gardens.
Avenal State Prison
Some days in the garden just feel like a balm.
Earlier this month at Avenal State Prison (ASP), participants spent a full planting day restoring beds, turning compost, cleaning the bird bath, and filling the garden with new life. Other men on the yard stopped at the gate to say the smell of fresh soil and cut herbs reminded them of their grandmother's house.
Participants chopped, mixed, and turned the compost piles with care, leaving everything in careful order. Others dug out bermuda grass, trimmed back woody herbs, and worked 200 pounds of rich soil and 50 pounds of homemade compost into the beds.
The tulips and amaryllis are already coming up. Every week the guys seek them out, check on them, and can't stop exclaiming over them. This week they added even more to look forward to: three kinds of basil, cilantro, spinach, oregano, parsley, chamomile, blue bee peonies, marigolds, cosmos, amaranth, celosia, zucchini, squash, pepinos, bush beans, three kinds of tomatoes, and enough chilis to keep things spicy.
They finished by giving the beds a long, deep soak before calling it a day.
A garden tended with that much care has a way of tending back.
“I never took time out to stop and smell the roses literally. I now see the beauty in places that before I would always overlook. Every week I check on my plants. The whole process is beautiful, and I love sharing my newfound hobby with others. I truly feel blessed to be a part of this program.”
- Rudy, ASP Program Participant
Central California Women's Facility
A Great Egret has been visiting our garden at Central California Women's Facility, and it stopped our Program Manager in her tracks.
It was the first egret ever seen there. It had been coming daily for a week. Egrets hunt insects, rodents, and small animals. Their arrival is not random. It means the garden is becoming part of something larger.
The care our participants pour into this land does not stay within the walls. Healthier soil attracts insects. Insects attract birds. This is what it looks like when people tend the earth and the earth responds.