"This is where the essence of true life is. It is this basic beginning,” Roz Brooks says, fingers resting on the damp earth around a perfect spear of asparagus. With an almost musical snap, she offers the thick green base—the part I always toss because it’s dry and woody. But nibbling through this five-acre island of a farm, radishes and carrots to saffron and chives, I’m becoming a believer.

Clean and sweet on my tongue, natural sugars at their peak, this tender spring bite reminds me of the wild stuff that grew in our horse pasture when I was a kid, and makes me regret every starchy grocery-store stalk. “We want people to get their hands in the dirt. We want people to experience fresh food,” Brooks presses. “When you have more of a connection to your food it begins to grow your health, so those things that you have going on in the body begin to transform and the body begins to heal itself. And that literally does grow your life."

For six years, sharing that message has been the former school teacher’s mission through Vegas Roots, a nonprofit community garden on Tonopah Drive just north of the 95 that she summoned almost single-handedly from an empty lot. It was donated by former Oakland/LA Raiders running back and Las Vegas NAACP President Frank Hawkins, a developer who knew that Brooks was a health coach with a dream of combating inner-city food deserts. There was just one teensy problem.

“I had never even planted a seed. Never. And this was just a hot mess,” Brooks says, showing me a photo of the land before she took it on, just dirt and gravel and a lonely pile of construction scraps. There were tears. And panic about the fact that while a lot of people seemed excited to help or offer expertise, many didn't follow through. Some seemed more eager to push their own visions than to build what Roz was seeing—not some rigid operation with a formal board and a bunch of protocols; she wanted the project to stay nimble and loose, and for its services to have community impact beyond supplying suburban families with Swiss chard. Her original dream had been to open a day shelter for the local homeless, and she still felt called to reach people in need. "I just said, you know what, if this is where God is leading me then I’ll tighten up my bootstraps and just do it. And so, for the first probably six months I was at the library every day, I was at the bookstore every day just reading gardening books, watching a lot of YouTube videos and trying to see how to do it. Just one seed at a time, one pair of hands at a time, this is what we’ve created."

Taking in the patchwork rows and raised beds, the orchard and chicken coop, the playhouse, classroom and outdoor kitchen with its clay pizza oven, the painted tree trunks and supple grapevines beautifully consuming the picnic area, I can’t believe what Brooks and a handful of volunteers have manifested. The mural-covered fence might as well be a force field around this lush little world of green shoots drawing in honeybees and birds. The air is different.

Vegas Roots has grown like a lot of things do in this city’s unforgiving soil: sometimes spurting, sometimes withering, but tenaciously in bloom. Sustaining it is a balancing act Brooks is still dialing in, tugged between gardening, administrating, writing grants, planning events and teaching. Foundational programs depend on patrons, like Adopt a Plot ($500 a year for a custom raised bed), the You-Pick Garden ($1-$2 per handful for greens and herbs, fruits and veggies by weight and everything on the honor system when no one's around) and the kid-centric gardening/cooking camp Lil’ Roots ($10 a month for classes and personalized plots). Brooks says she started the latter in September because she was struggling to make rent on the office. She’s been creative in trying to monetize this place, hosting summer movie nights and sunset yoga, and looking at a pizza-making event once the oven is completed. She also does onsite wellness coaching and a 9-week course on beating diabetes, and she’s working with a veteran herbalist on developing a garden pharmacy.

But this being a community space, Vegas Roots is also soil for community endeavors beyond its fence, hosting SOUP (Support Organize Unite People) dinners that culminate in microgrants, and soon to launch the Veggie Buck Truck thanks to a $25,000 USDA grant.

Wrapped in produce glamour-shots and rocking a “Veggies” vanity plate, the truck is modeled on a mobile farmers’ market doing great service in Washington, D.C. For the June 3 maiden voyage, Brooks will visit the local welfare office, and she plans to hit low-income senior centers once the truck is running three days a week. In tandem, she’s brainstorming a cookbook featuring local chefs that she'd give those customers—one freebie for every two sold. “If I can’t get y’all to come to the garden, I’m just gonna have to bring the garden to you,” she says. "It needs to be everywhere. Nevada is one of the few states where race regarding disease and obesity, there’s very, very little disparity." Basically, the food desert is bigger than we think.

Brooks mentions a mission trip to Ghana, Africa, a couple years ago. She still can't get over how little the people had, and how peaceful they seemed. They didn't have time to be in the proverbial hamster wheel. And she believes a kindred sort of clarity can come from spending time tending a garden. You tend it, and it tends you.

As the sun turns smoky purple and molten orange behind the hills, I walk the rows and see how much dirt is still waiting for hands to dig in. Like any growing thing, Vegas Roots needs to be fed and loved. It needs us. Putting a fine point on what it means to this urban pocket, a neighborhood kid playing around the fire pit takes a monster bite of a whole raw cucumber. I ask if he’s really eating that. He gives me this priceless look, like he can’t imagine why I’m asking.

Vegas Roots Tuesday-Saturday, 9 a.m.-2 p.m. 715 N. Tonopah Drive, 702-636-4152, vegasroots.org.