n the first Saturday of spring, members of the Salt Lake Valley’s queer community gathered at the Moonstead, the Mobile Moon Co-op’s half-acre urban farm, to celebrate the changing seasons and the Persian New Year, Nowruz. Strong winds caught at the plastic covering the greenhouse and toppled pistachios on the haft seen — a ceremonial table holding seven items that start with the Persian letter sin. Despite the wind, Camlyn Giddins and Yasi Shaker, Mobile Moon’s event coordinators, opened with a calm garden meditation. “Invite what the mycelium might be gifting you this spring,” Giddins said.
Guests circled around the chakra garden, and Giddins and Shaker pointed out the herbs that were planted for each of the body’s energy centers, such as the abundant sage green leaves of lavender at the crown chakra bed. When Rikki Longino, Mobile Moon’s farm coordinator, dreamed up the Moonstead, they took inspiration from their ancestors from India who utilized Ayurvedic medicine practices.
Participants sat by the garden beds and closed their eyes; near them, onions, sage and rhubarb awakened. Wind gusts harmonized with crowing roosters and the buzz of nearby highways. The neighborhood, in West Valley City, is a suburb of Salt Lake where homes sit near strip malls, warehouses and farms in the Jordan River floodplain. It’s one of Utah’s most ethnically and racially diverse areas. There are no sidewalks in the neighborhood and people ride horses down the street, yet downtown Salt Lake is only a 10-minute drive away.
After the garden meditation, Giddins and Shaker invited participants to gather around the haft seen table. Shaker, who grew up in Iran, said, “Nowruz is a cultural tradition I hold on to tight.” Shaker immigrated to the U.S. eight years ago, and they continue to celebrate this 3,000-year-old holiday from their motherland every year. They explained the symbolism of the different items on the table — seer (garlic) for health and serkeh (vinegar) for patience — then invited attendees to share an item they hoped to bring into the new year. Numerous people picked the table itself because it symbolized tradition. “We so badly need ceremonies,” Shaker said.
CREATING SPACE FOR CEREMONY and tradition is part of what defines Mobile Moon. The co-op is a queer and femme-led gardening collective that grows herbs, fruit and vegetables and transforms them into teas, tinctures and salves. Charlotte Pili, Mobile Moon’s zine editor, told High Country News it’s about remembering old ways that people used to navigate the world. The co-op’s mission is to aid communities and ecosystems through botanical stewardship, education and empowerment, whether through celebrating ancestral holidays or learning how to grow food and mend clothes.
Plants are a good starting point for that work. “Plants are so reciprocal, so reliable. When you care for them, they show up,” said Shaker.
Shaker told High Country News that when people buy something at the store, they seldom know who made it or how it was made. But when someone buys a lotion or herbed salt blend from Mobile Moon, they know who harvested the herbs and processed them.
The collective also seeks to address inequitable access to community, food and land — particularly for people of color and queer, femme and trans folks. White people own 98% of the private farm acreage in the United States, while only 9% of the nation’s farms are run entirely by women, according to the 2017 Census of Agriculture. Finding data on queer farmers is more challenging; the 2017 census found that 1.2% of two-producer farms in the U.S. were run by queer people. But that data is limited: It’s based on marital status — “women married to women,” for example — so only legally married people are represented.
Longino founded Mobile Moon in 2017 with a desire to fill a gap they noticed in land-based spaces for Salt Lake’s queer community. They grew up learning regenerative agriculture on five acres of forested land in Olympia, Washington. When they moved to Salt Lake over a decade ago, they got involved in the local community gardening scene. But they didn’t find as much of the scrappy, land-based projects they were surrounded by as a kid.
“Plants are so reciprocal, so reliable. When you care for them, they show up.”
So, in 2016, they hopped on their bike and pedaled off to various cooperatives and community gardens — places like Off Beet Farm in Boulder, Colorado, and Chicago’s Dill Pickle Food Co-op. They also spent time with land defenders at Standing Rock and at pipeline fights in Florida. When they returned to Salt Lake, they put everything they’d learned into building their own scrappy, land-based project.
The Mobile Moon Co-op didn’t start with land, but rather a 40-foot-long 1980s school bus. Longino converted the bus into an apothecary to host fermentation workshops, tea parties and a zine library. With friends, they painted the bus a warm red and pastel purple, complete with black-and-white orbs waxing and waning through the 28-day moon cycle.
The bus fulfilled the “mobile” part of the collective’s name, traveling to community events throughout the Salt Lake Valley; Longino felt it was important to make their work accessible. Eventually, though, it became hard to find a consistent place to park the bus, and they began looking for affordable land to purchase.
On a spring day in 2019, Longino biked west from Salt Lake City toward West Valley. They pedaled under the city’s spaghetti bowl of highways and whizzed by warehouses and manufacturing facilities in Salt Lake’s industrial zone. Once they reached the Jordan River — a Great Salt Lake tributary that was heavily polluted for decades — they coasted down the bike pathway until they reached a neighborhood called Chesterfield. “From suburban strip-mall land, you take a turn into Chesterfield, and it’s like you’re suddenly rural,” Longino said. They found a vacant lot for sale and immediately called a friend on a local community gardening board who was also a real estate agent. Friends and family helped them scrape together the money to buy it.
Back then, the Moonstead was a field of thistles, dandelions and cleavers dotted with large Siberian elms. Longino and friends removed rocks and rusted scrap metal and negotiated with the city to get potable water piped in. Slowly, they started planting.
AFTER ATTENDEES OF THE SPRING celebration learned about Nowruz, they gathered around Mobile Moon’s outdoor kitchen for a feast. A handsewn banner that read “Free Palestine” adorned a long table covered in stuffed bell peppers, baba ghanoush and cucumber salad. The collective sold baked goods and zines, with proceeds going to Operation Olive Branch, a relief fund for Palestinian families fleeing their homeland.
Mobile Moon members describe their work as inherently political. Longino said they resonate with the slogan “smash the state,” though “myceliate the state” may be more fitting for Mobile Moon. As Longino put it: “Mycelium permeates from multiple angles at once, and the decay that we see is actually the nourishment for a next world.”
“So much harm has been done in binary thinking about what belongs and what doesn’t belong,” they said. “That’s a weed: Eradicate it, spray it. That’s a queer person: Evict them, make them change. I think the role of queer spaces is to think beyond binaries.”
The expansive thinking that permeates Mobile Moon makes the organization hard to define. It’s a garden and co-op with a non-hierarchical structure where all are invited to contribute their ideas and dreams. Members experiment with alternative economic models and redistribute 30% of their proceeds to local groups like the Utah Abortion Fund or to queer community members who need help with medical bills. Mobile Moon serves as a hub for DIY skill-sharing and educational events, such as natural-building workshops, planting days and book clubs. And for many of those involved, it’s a home base. Not in the sense of a physical house — though there is a trailer and bus on the land if someone needs a place to stay — but rather in the community created.
“That’s a weed: Eradicate it, spray it. That’s a queer person: Evict them, make them change. I think the role of queer spaces is to think beyond binaries.”
Daley Yoshimura, who coordinates the organization’s monthly Moonboxes with Zodiac-inspired goods, described Mobile Moon as a “beacon.” She grew up in Utah and buried her sexuality; it was hard enough being a person of color and not Mormon. Yoshimura left Utah as a young adult but returned in her late 20s and found Mobile Moon. “I was like, ‘What!? These spaces are around, that’s amazing!’” she said. Still, Utah remains a challenging place for queer communities and people of color; in recent years, the Utah Legislature has passed numerous anti-trans and anti-DEI bills.
The old school bus is now permanently parked on the Moonstead. During the Nowruz and spring equinox celebration, it was a cozy space to shelter from the cold winds, read the Co-op’s newest zine and sip tea and mojitos made with homegrown herbs.
As the Nowruz and equinox celebration neared its end, the wind transitioned to rain, and people danced in the spring shower. Shaker told me that many queer people live in survival mode. “We can’t have our guard down,” they said. It’s different on the Moonstead, one of the few places they and others in the queer community feel they can thrive. “We deserve to feel safe,” they said.
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This article appeared in the May 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Mycelia the state.”
