Gathings Gardens Cultivates More Than Food for Northern New Mexico
A seed. A seed seems small. A seed seems insignificant. Do not be fooled. A seed becomes many ruby-red tomatoes. A seed becomes a vine gemmed with juicy watermelons. A seed becomes a tree bejeweled with fruits. Or, in the case of Gathings Gardens, a seed becomes one family’s mission to use regenerative farming to feed their community.
Based in Bloomfield, New Mexico, Gathings is a family owned and operated farm and nursery that provides fresh produce primarily to schools, senior centers, and food banks, functioning with for-profit and nonprofit wings. Jeremy and Selece Gathings launched the enterprise in 2022. Although he’d grown up in Bloomfield, Jeremy spent a long stint in Texas running a successful landscaping business. He was shocked when he moved back to find the once-thriving community wracked with poverty.
“I feel like when I left [20 years ago], the oil and gas market was still really strong. But you see a lot of the times in southern Colorado, they’ll use up all the resources and then kinda just leave everything high and dry. It’s kind of striking to see the amount of poverty and the issues and everything that comes with it and how that’s increased here,” Jeremy explains.
The Gathings quickly surmised that the community sat in a food desert where fresh produce was largely inaccessible to most people. They purchased land, ready to roll up their sleeves and start cultivating some crops, but there was a problem. The soil had sat fallow for over two decades. It was completely devoid of organic matter and totally dried out. “It was like a gray sand there,” Jeremy notes.
Worst of all, beneath the thin layer of sand sat a hardpan layer, too solid for tubers and most root systems.
The More You Know, The More You Grow
Undaunted, Jeremy and Selece pressed on. They were able to produce Brassica species, or cabbages like kale, collard greens, and Swiss chard. Roma tomatoes thrived, along with beets, carrots, and a small plot of blue corn. The gardens produced enough to supply veggie varieties for the San Juan College Food Hub’s 80 weekly CSA boxes.
“They just go around all the farms and pick up whatever order they need to assemble everything. It’s been a really cool resource,” Jeremy explains. Gathings Gardens next teamed up with a local food bank and, as of 2024, provided 500 pounds of produce per week.
The Gathings only recently discovered Table to Farm’s locally produced compost and artisan soils and were able to mix it into their seed trays and soil blocks. “We’ve been happy so far. We’re getting good germination and everything!” Jeremy beams.
Feeling confident that the soil amendment will help their yields flourish, Gathings acquired 80 cubic yards of compost for the 2025 growing season. “We’re actually in the next 5 weeks putting about a 3-inch mulching layer in our beds,” he explains. “Grady and everybody up there has been really easy to deal with.”
But even as the garden supplied more facilities in need, the Gathings felt like there as more they could do. So, they organized clothing drives and shoe drives. They distributed roughly 1,500 shoes!
But was there more they could do? Absolutely! They networked with the University of New Mexico and several other colleges to give hands-on experience to students studying agriculture. They education outreach didn’t stop there. They installed on-site gardens at Apache and Animas Elementary Schools. Twelve raised beds, a hoop house, and 6 rows for in-ground crops demonstrate diverse growing methods to young people. And when school lets out for the summer, families transform the Animas plots into a community garden, supplying their households with healthy, organic fruits and veggies.
Regeneration for the Next Generation
Inspiring the next generation to know and love gardening mattered deeply to the Gathings. “We wanted to work with the school system to educate kids and try to develop a base,” he says.
The drive to educate the next generation roots deep into Jeremy’s past. His parents gardened and some of his fondest memories from childhood formed inside that green, lush nursery. “Walking barefoot, squishing mud through my feet, and picking sweet peas and strawberries…” Jeremy trails off with a dreamy grin.
Adulthood took him away from these cherished experiences, but then he, his wife and children made a home garden in 2015 and he was instantly alight with the passion to produce food. “It just was immediately that feeling of seeing the stuff sprout. The first two weeks of anticipation and not knowing if anything was gonna come up and then seeing it kind of brought back all those memories of really enjoying the fresh food and feeling the dirt under your feet!”
He and Selece love seeing their own children—ages 6, 8, and 17—marveling at the garden’s unique and curious existence. “They love the bugs!” Jeremy laughs. Gardens definitely attract and need insects, like pollinators. Other bugs and birds arrive to snack on the pollinators. The soil fills with more insect societies who take advantage of the nutrients infused into the ground, while also adding in vital contributions of their own. Larger herbivore, omnivore, and carnivore critters join the cyclical give-and-take that is nature.
It’s this regenerative exchange that the Gathings want to pass on, not just to their children, but to their entire community.
“We wanted to be a core part of the community and work with everybody. We saw the need. And it’s something that we really enjoyed. Looking at the data and knowing that there was such a big need is really kind of giving us a drive to keep going.”
And thus, like a single seed, the Gathings family has become so much more—a treasury of resources for those in need. As Jeremy puts it, “If there’s any families in the area that are in need of resources, even if we can’t provide them, we’ve got a lot of contacts. We definitely want to help out.”