The garden gate at 415 N. Mountain Ave. swings open on a Tuesday evening in October, and for three hours the newest piece of Tucson's school-garden network belongs to whoever walks in. The Sprouts House, the garden and culinary complex tucked beside Mansfield Magnet Middle School, hosts an open house Oct. 20 from 4 to 7 p.m., with food, music, and the run of the garden and greenhouse. Visitors park at Mansfield and wander.
That looseness is the point. The Sprouts House is a teaching facility, and teaching facilities are usually closed to the public. This is a chance to see what a $2.5 million investment in dirt and bungalows actually looks like.
The story starts with two buildings that had been sitting next to Mansfield for a very long time. The bungalows date to the early 1920s and 1930s, according to the Arizona Daily Star, which covered the project as it came together. The University of Arizona owns them. For years they were simply old structures on a midtown block. Now one of them is a classroom and the other houses a community kitchen — a serious one, where students prepare meals from produce grown in the district's roughly 20 school gardens. Some of that food cycles back into TUSD cafeterias.
The money behind it came largely from one place. Sprouts Healthy Communities Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Phoenix-based Sprouts Farmers Market grocery chain, put in $1.1 million toward the $2.5 million Culinary Bungalows project. Private donations covered most of the rest, said Moses Thompson, director of the UA School Garden Workshop. The houses were named "The Sprouts House" in recognition of the gift.
The foundation's interest is not incidental. Its stated mission is nutrition education and hands-on gardening for children, on the theory that kids who grow fruits and vegetables tend to eat more of them, and that cooking instruction cements the habit. It funds more than 100 nonprofit partners nationally and convenes a biennial Growing School Gardens Summit. The Sprouts House is that philosophy built in brick and raised beds.
The School Garden Workshop itself is a collaboration between the University of Arizona and Tucson Unified School District that began in fall 2011. Its model is elegantly simple: UA undergraduates spend six to eight hours a week in TUSD schools, maintaining gardens and helping teachers figure out how to use a horticulture bed as a classroom. The program already serves about 20 Tucson elementary schools and a network of more than 50 school-based gardens. The Sprouts House gives it a headquarters.
The scale of the thing is easy to underestimate. The Sprouts House provides weekly gardening and nutrition instruction to roughly 800 middle school students at Mansfield. Annually, the program projects it will reach about 150 educators, 150 university students, and more than 6,000 K-12 students. That is a lot of leverage from two old bungalows and a greenhouse.
There is a memorial inside the project, too. The small garden on the grounds was dedicated in mid-December to the late Bobby Gentry, a Tucson master gardener and home cook who died in January 2024. Gentry's widow, Tucson publicist Norma Gentry, and their son Matt raised $25,000 for the garden, which will be used to train UA student interns. It is called Bobby's Garden.
The Sprouts House opened to students and faculty in January 2026, when the bungalows hosted professional development training for teachers. That makes this October open house a first look for the broader public — a building that has been in use for less than a year, showing itself off.
October is a good month for it. Tucson's second growing season is underway by then, the summer's punishing heat finally broken, and a school garden in mid-October is at its most legible: things going in, things coming out, the greenhouse doing the work it was built for.
The details are uncomplicated. Tuesday, Oct. 20, 4 to 7 p.m., 415 N. Mountain Ave. Food, music, a greenhouse, a garden, and a kitchen built to turn both into lunch. Parking at Mansfield Magnet Middle School.