When Impact 100 Redwood Circle member Katie Torgerson says she’s “knee deep in tomato plants,” she’s not kidding. This spring she tended 3,000 tomato starts in the backyard greenhouse her contractor husband built using old windows he salvaged from various remodel projects. In addition to the tomatoes, Katie’s greenhouse is also home to 2,000 green peppers, 300 eggplants and lots of basil, all the makings for a gigantic batch of ratatouille.
Actually, Katie’s vegetable plants were part of the late April plant sale benefitting Santa Rosa’s Harvest for the Hungry Garden program. Some of her seedlings will be planted in the program’s extensive community garden at Christ Church United Methodist on Yulupa Ave. Those will eventually mature and become donated produce for local food banks, shelters and senior programs.
Not surprisingly, “Spring is my favorite time of year,” she says. “ I love watching plants emerge and getting my hands dirty.” A Santa Rosa native, Katie’s interest in gardening surfaced early.
“My Mom was a good gardener,” she recalls. “I have fond memories of us working side by side in the garden.” She entered her prize petunias in the Sonoma County Fair and accompanied her physician father on house calls “to small farms out in the country where some patients paid his bill with fruits and veggies.”
A graduate of Ursuline High School, Katie earned her R.N. degree at St. Luke’s School of Nursing in San Francisco and spent nine years doing nursing work in Tuolumne County. “It’s small, so you have to do a little of everything,” she says. That meant Katie had rotations in specialties as diverse as public health, intensive care and neonatology; she even did some teaching at the local junior college. She met husband Ron Marley on a blind date in Sonora. “At the time, I didn’t realize how smart it was to marry a general contractor,” she laughs.
The couple returned to Sonoma County to be near Katie’s family and to allow her to earn her B.S. degree in nursing at Sonoma State. She rounded out her nursing career working in cardiac rehabilitation and home care. Ron and Katie share a passion for adventure travel and have visited Cuba, Japan, Mexico, Europe, South America ,Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, hiking and biking whenever they can. They plan on packing their bags again when Covid restrictions are lifted.
They were able to combine his construction expertise and her medical expertise in a “life changing” trip to Cameroon, West Africa, in 1986. “It was a program through the Lutheran Church in Santa Rosa,” Katie recalls. “They needed a nurse and a builder and we thought that sounded like us.” For three months Katie treated patients with infectious diseases “we’re just not used to seeing” while Ron worked on water and sanitation system improvements designed to prevent the kinds of diseases Katie was treating. Their experience living with extreme poverty and deadly disease left them with admiration for the ”incredible survival skills” of the local population and a feeling “we have no reason to ever get too upset about anything,” she notes.
