Greater San Antonio Community Gardens, Farmer’s Markets, & Permaculture Resources

Click slider icon at top left of map for an overview of locations and hours. For additions/subtractions/suggested edits, drop us a line. — Scott Kanski, Page Editor

Discounts: WIC Participants and seniors receive special discounts on a variety of goods at select markets. See details in this San Antonio Food Bank factsheet.

Garden Centers

• Rainbow Gardens (Bandera)
  • 8516 Bandera Rd, San Antonio, TX 78250
    • Display gardens, educational signs, expert-led classes and events, along with helpful advice from our state-certified nursery professionals all contribute to your gardening success. Our vegetable and herb selection at our Thousand Oaks location can challenge and surpass all other San Antonio nurseries. Unique features at the Bandera Road store like our old mill, butterfly habitat, and enchanted gnome forest make gardening fun for the whole family.
• Rainbow Gardens (Thousand Oaks)
  • 2585 Thousand Oaks Dr, San Antonio, TX 78232
    • Display gardens, educational signs, expert-led classes and events, along with helpful advice from our state-certified nursery professionals all contribute to your gardening success. Our vegetable and herb selection at our Thousand Oaks location can challenge and surpass all other San Antonio nurseries. Unique features at the Bandera Road store like our old mill, butterfly habitat, and enchanted gnome forest make gardening fun for the whole family.
• Evergreen Garden Center
  • 922 W Hildebrand Ave, San Antonio, TX 78201
    • We carry a wide selection of native and adapted plants suitable for Central Texas gardens and homes. Our inventory includes fruit trees, seasonal vegetables, perennials, cacti, succulent, indoor plants, palm trees, shrubs, vines, roses and more. We carry a wide variety of soils specifically crafted for every specific plant. We carry lines of organic fertilizers, insect management solutions, disease control options and specific plant foods. All ORGANIC!
• Fanick’s Garden Center
  • 1025 Holmgreen Rd, San Antonio, TX 78220
    • Enduring nursery on a 70 acre site, specializing in trees, shrubs, roses & organic fertilizers.
• Paul’s Desertrt
  • 200 Schertz Pkwy, Schertz, TX 78154
    • Paul’s Desert is a retail nursery specializing in landscape cactus and succulents that proudly serves San Antonio, Schertz, Laredo, Del Rio, Austin, Houston, Corpus Christi, and all other communities in South Texas. We don’t offer grass, topsoil, trees, or shrubs, and we do offer you the opportunity to acquire cactus and succulents from all over the world that are very beautiful and majestic. In addition to these cactus and succulents, we also offer repotting service and Paul’s Desert cactus soil.
• Milberger’s Landscaping and Nursery
  • 3920 N Loop 1604 E, San Antonio, TX 78247
    • With a rich heritage dating back to the 1970’s, we have been proudly serving our community with a commitment to excellence and a passion for plants that spans generations. We invite you to experience the beauty and bounty of nature with us, where knowledge, selection, and service come together to create a thriving South Texas landscape.
• Pollinatives
  • 101 South St, Converse, TX 78109
    • Pollinatives is a startup garden center. Our goal is to offer the best selection of Central Texas native plants for your home habitat, wildlife and pollinator gardens.

Farmers Markets

Community Gardens

• Alamo Heights Community Garden 130-198 Imlay St, Alamo Heights, TX 78209
• Alta Vista Community Garden 3301 N Flores St, San Antonio, TX 78212
• Beacon Hill Community Garden 1144 W Gramercy Pl, San Antonio, TX 78201
• Centennial Garden 101-123 Bancroft Ave, San Antonio, TX 78201
• Collins Garden Community Farm 200 N Park Blvd, San Antonio, TX 78204
• Denver Heights Community Center 300 Porter St, San Antonio, TX 78210
• Eastside Sprout Garden N Olive and Lamar St, San Antonio, TX 78202
• El Dorado Community Garden 12606 Prima Vista Dr, San Antonio, TX 78233
• Fuerza Unida Community Garden 710 New Laredo Hwy, San Antonio, TX 78211
• Garcia Street Urban Farm 218 Garcia St, San Antonio, TX 78203
• High Country Community Garden 16418 Cypress Park St, San Antonio, TX 78247
• International Community Garden of San Antonio 4242 Bluemel Rd, San Antonio, TX 78240
• Jefferson Community Garden 2350 W Gramercy Pl, San Antonio, TX 78201
• Just Love Community Garden 217 Pershing Ave, San Antonio, TX 78209
• Labor Serena Community Garden 1246 Chalmers Ave, San Antonio, TX 78211
• Lakeview Community Garden 1202 Plaza Lake Dr, San Antonio, TX 78245
• Landa Community Garden 233 Bushnell Ave, San Antonio, TX 78212
• Mahncke Park Community Garden 330 Funston Pl, San Antonio, TX 78209
• Mission Branch Library Community Garden 3134 Roosevelt Ave, San Antonio, TX 78214
• Olmos Park Terrace Community Garden 201 W Mandalay Dr, San Antonio, TX 78212
• Palo Alto Community Garden 1400 W Villaret Blvd, San Antonio, TX 78224
• Pittman-Sullivan Community Garden Dakota & S Palmetto, San Antonio, TX 78203
• Reconciliation Oaks Community Garden 8900 Starcrest Dr, San Antonio, TX 78217
• River Road Community Garden 780 E Huisache Ave, San Antonio, TX 78212
• Southtown Community Garden 1012 S Presa St, San Antonio, TX 78210
• St. Mary’s University Community Garden 2507 NW 36th St, San Antonio, TX 78228
• St. Philip’s Community Garden 404 Hedges Street, San Antonio, TX 78203
• Tamōx Talōm Food Forest at Padre Park 6515 Padre Dr, San Antonio, TX 78214
• Terrell Heights Community Garden 650-690 Greenwich Blvd, San Antonio, TX 78209
• The Well at Tecolote 7910 Donore Pl, San Antonio, TX 78229
• University of the Incarnate Word Community Garden4301 Broadway, San Antonio, TX 78209

Urban Farms and CSAs

• GreenBexar Farm
  • Based upon the principles of regenerative agriculture, Green Bexar Farm is located on a 10-acre pecan orchard in Saint Hedwig, Texas, right outside the big city of San Antonio.
• Habitable Spaces
  • A community arts and agricultural project where artists and the rural community can take classes, learn, and share ideas. We offer workshops and classes on sustainable farming, experimental building techniques, traditional craft, and fine art. In 2016 we began our first official artist-in-residence program.

Critical Thoughts on Gardens & Growing

Spotlight: Stephen Lucke

DIY Foraging Projects

• Foraging Texas
  • Meet Dr. Mark “Merriwether” Vorderbruggen and join him as he reveals the edible and medicinal wild plants of Texas!

Permaculture: Skills for Living Land Care

The watersheds of the San Antonio, Medina, and Guadalupe Rivers are home to a proliferating number of efforts to shift land relations via permaculture—“a multidisciplinary toolbox” that seeks to construct landscapes and social systems that “imitate the no-waste, closed-loop systems seen in diverse natural systems” rather than working against them. Though its most immediate origins are settler colonial movements for sustainable agriculture, permaculture can be considered the Western arrival at many of the same principles and models for right relations to land that Indigenous cultures have practiced worldwide for millennia. In that respect, Rohini Walker argues, it should be thought of as “fundamentally an indigenous science.”

(For more on this, see: “On Land: Restoring Right Relations.”)

Studying the permaculture movement in recent years, Christina Ergas draws on lessons from Cuba and the Pacific Northwest, defining permaculture’s three main tenets as “caring for the Earth, caring for the people, and sharing the surplus.” These, she continues in a recent article, “offer a potential path toward climate justice, which is a response to well-researched phenomena that climate change disproportionately harms underprivileged groups in economic, public health and other ways.”

Our region is fortunate to have a number of efforts at spreading permaculture concepts as well as numerous skill-building opportunities!

For additions/subtractions/suggested edits, drop us a line.

• Austin Permaculture Guild
  • We are an ever growing community in Central Texas committed to resilience, collaboration, and catalyzing diversity and abundance. We believe that although one person can’t change the world, together We can.
• Earth Repairian
  • The mission of the Earth Repairian YouTube channel is to inspire and empower humans to restore ecological balance to the earth. Here at our Central Texas studio and demonstration laboratory, we are building a micro eco-village based on experiential living techniques and investing our time, money and energy into 100 percent sustainable practices. We will actively report on these techniques and tools for living sustainably, implementing sustainable farming and gardening and on all the ways we can create and thrive in a more non-toxic world.
• Gardopia Gardens
  • Gardopia sprouted in 2015 to address health disparities in a high-crime corridor on the near-Eastside of San Antonio. Initially funded by the San Antonio Housing Authority (SAHA), Gardopia implemented crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) as a methodology to reduce crime around an abandoned lot. Working with SAHA, this became San Antonio Eastside’s first “gardopia,” or garden utopia, where neighbors grow their own food and transform their community. 
• Garden Volunteers of South Texas
  • Nonprofit focused on water conservation and environmental awareness with fellow private, public, and educational organizations as a community resource.
• Land Heritage Institute
  • LHI is a 1,200 acre living land museum dedicated to training the next generation of conservationists (of natural resources, the histories and cultures of this place, and its built environments). LHI promotes environmental literacy and sustainable practices by providing a resource for lifelong learners to pursue the passions of life such as art, hiking, riding and all forms of wildlife watching.
• Native Backyards
  • ”Together we can help save the environment from our own yards!”
• Native Plant Society of Texas – San Antonio
  • The Native Plant Society of Texas wants to protect our state’s native plant heritage and preserve it for future generations. We are a non-profit organization, run by volunteers, sponsoring educational programs, workshops, demonstration gardens and many other types of projects.
• SanArte Healing and Cultural Clinic
  • SanArte is a community-led cultural healing and empowerment collective that offers live and virtual programming, mobile clinics, education, and facilitation to activate ancestral wisdom, traditional healing practices, and nurture a collaborative spirit in communities in Yanaguana (the greater San Antonio/Central Texas area).
• Talking Tree Farm
  • Permaculture classes offered by experts in an outdoor, hands-on environment.
• Texas Master Gardeners (Bexar County)
  • Volunteer development program offered by the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service designed to increase the availability of horticultural information and improve the quality of life through horticultural projects.
• Texas Master Naturalists (San Antonio area chapter)
  • The mission of the Alamo Area Chapter is to develop a corps of well-informed volunteers who provide education, outreach, and service dedicated to the beneficial management of natural resources and natural areas within our community for the state of Texas.</li>
• The Human Path
  • The Human Path is a survival school that is focused around the survival of our human species. To this end, our classes are sustainability and earth-centric, yet also very practical and realistic. Food, herbal medicine, self-defense, more.
• The Well at Tecalote
  • The Well at Tecolote is a nature sanctuary in the heart of the San Antonio Medical Center. We are a nature-based regenerative educational and healing resource center, committed to creating a positive impact on our community. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, we strive to provide a space for connection, growth, and transformation.
• Yanawana Herbolarios
  • Our Mission is to share, preserve, and honor cultural knowledge of the land and make it universally accessible as a means to empower and revive the practice of holistic living, medical botanical usage, water and land stewardship, and coming together as a community in times of need.