Beyond the Patch: New Directions in Community Gardening

 

Vertical garden at Freeway Estates Community Orchard

My recent posts have focused on Seattle's many and varied P-Patches. But there are a number of other community gardens in the city, some folded into city programs, others run by private groups. Many have sprung up in the last decade or so as a new surge of interest in food security and food justice blooms. Let's take a look at a few of these!

Meadowbrook Community Garden, 2021.

Small Garden, Big Goals: The Meadowbrook Community Gardens and Orchards

Meadowbrook Community Gardens and Orchards are made up of several components on the grounds of the Meadowbrook Community Center and Playfield in Northeast Seattle. A small communal garden sits adjacent to a large sprawling hillside planted with orchard trees and an "edible hedge." The grounds are owned by the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation; The gardens and orchards are maintained by the neighborhood gardeners with help from Meadowbrook Community CARE (aka MC2), a local nonprofit. Longtime gardeners Sue McGann and John Samaras, along with MC2's Terry Vogel, have taken the lead in nurturing and sustaining the garden.

Although the garden may be small, the gardeners aim for a much larger impact through advocacy and education.

Agricultural history

This corner of the Meadowbrook neighborhood has a history of growing things. The Fischer family farmed the area from the 1890s until the 1920s. Some of the fruit trees they tended may still stand on the hillside. Fischer Place is named for them. The large farm house they built about 1913 still stands directly across from the orchard grounds on 105th Street. Oriental Gardens, a landscape nursery operated by the Nishitani family for six decades beginning in 1912, was located just a few blocks south along Ravenna Avenue. 

After one or two false starts, garden minded folks in Meadowbrook received permission from the parks department to create a small garden at the far western side of the community center property, along Ravenna Avenue, in 2010. Some two dozen raised beds were constructed and laid out in a pattern that, from above, forms the image of a petalled flower. The beds are farmed cooperatively -- no individual plots here! The volunteers share the produce among themselves and with the local Lake City food bank, operated by North Helpline.

The Meadowbrook "flower garden"

Restoring an orchard

Some years earlier, a different effort took place on the adjoining hillside. Landscape gardener and neighbor Kevin Burkhart, who had been working with others in restoring the Meadowbrook wetlands, took it upon himself to plant fruit-bearing trees on the former orchard grounds. He received financial support from PCC Consumer-Coop and from a family who wished to create a living memorial for a loved one. Professor Michael Quinn of the UW School of Drama had passed away from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at the age of 36. 

The project unfolded gradually over several years and attracted a lot of volunteer support:

"In '95 I planted the first trees on the hillside and every year after '95 till 2005. We kept planting a few more each year. And, you know, we did things besides just the trees. There was a kind of zigzag trail that goes down the hill. And once we got 60 people from CISPES (Committee in Solidary with the People of El Salvador) out there. They do work parties. They came out with 60 people and we pretty much just had each person work five feet of trail and we turned it over and then brought down chips and the whole project was done in about three hours." (Kevin Burkhart)

Unfortunately, when Burkhart, the driving force behind the orchard, left the area in 2006, the trees suffered from neglect. With boots already on the ground, Meadowbrook Community CARE took on the care and feeding of the hillside orchard. In this they are ably assisted by children from the nearby Waldorf School and other community groups.

Kevin Burkhart's original diagram of his "Edible Arboretum" shows the hillside divided into several sectors, including the Edible Hedge along NE 105th Street. Plantings have been rearranged since.

An orchard of fig trees, 2022.

Edibles

The Meadowbrook Orchards offer an educational "Hedge of Edibles." The hedge, originally conceived and planted by Kevin Burkhart, fits perfectly into MC2's mission of outreach and education, particularly concerning the critical need for pollinators, and community building.

"And then another thing we have is an edible hedge along 105th, and it's more of an invitation to learn about all the things that can be grown in the Northwest that people of Seattle can eat or that are of benefit to the birds and the insects. So you want to try something or see something that you're curious about? It's all growing right in there -- all kinds: goji, goumi berries, hazelnuts, figs, seaberries, mulberries. It's just all a big mass of planting that grows year-round off and on." (Terry Vogel)

Terry Vogel, the community partnerships director for Maple Leaf Lutheran/MC2 sees a direct line between the threats to pollinators and issues of food equity:

"There are people in this church and in this community who are passionate about pollinators: bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds. So to kind of build on what's happening down there, we're trying to support them with that message of what pollinators are for us and for what it can mean for Seattle in general."

Kevin Burkhart's plan for the Edible Hedge.

The Edible Hedge on NE 105th Street

Thanks to Terry Vogel and Kevin Burkhart for oral history interviews and to Valarie Bunn for multiple posts about the Meadowbrook neighborhood in her blog: Wedgwood in Seattle History.

Behind the Sound Wall: Freeway Estates Community Orchard

Seattle has several community orchards scattered around town. Some are remnants of long ago plantings. Some are relatively new. Freeway Estates Community Orchard is a particularly innovative grove that combines fruit trees with berry bushes, vegetable patches, and herb gardens. It was founded by a group of neighbors in the Roosevelt/Green Lake neighborhood about the same time as the Meadowbrook garden, 2010. But while Meadowbrook sits on parks land, FECO grew on what was an overgrown, weedy strip of land owned by WSDOT, adjacent to the I-5 sound wall at 6th Avenue NE and NE 60th Street. Although not a P-Patch, FECO shares the fiscal sponsorship of GROW, formerly the P-Patch Trust. 

FECO is something of a hybrid. There are a few individual vegetable beds, by most of the trees and beds are tended by an informal group of neighbors and friends working together. Most of the food produced goes to the FamilyWorks food bank in Wallingford.

Innovation and experimentation are encouraged. The garden has several unusual projects on display, including pedal-operated drip irrigation, rain collection systems, thermal composting, a vertical garden.....and something called "Hügelkultur !" Pathways and barriers are all made from recycled materials, as is the garden art.

FECO gardeners believe in doing what you can with what you have, rather than forcing new systems on a natural setting. Nancy Helm explains:

"Part of our overall philosophy, which is oriented toward permaculture, is minimizing offsite inputs and keeping materials and nutrients on site. I think we've produced all of our soil on site."

The highlight of each year is the group's October Cider Fest, where sales of cider and pie raise funds for garden needs.

Hügelkultur (or hill culture) is the practice of creating small hills of rubble and decomposing organic material which will hold water and act as planting medium. Pictured here is FECO's herb spiral.

Cider, pies, and other goodies are on offer at FECO's annual Cider Fest. "It's not just about the money. It's about having people come out and see the orchard and see what we're doing and learn about it and have a little fun with the cider press and that sort of thing." (Nancy Helm)

Thanks to Nancy Helm for an oral history interview and to the highly detailed FECO website and blog.

Big City Farms: Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Marra Farm

The City of Seattle sponsors two community farms on city-owned land. Rainier Beach Urban Farm (and Wetlands) and Marra Farm are multi-purpose ventures in agriculture, both of which sprouted in the last decade.

I wrote a bit about Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands (RBUFW) in my last post, What Lies Beneath. It lies on land reclaimed (or really just claimed) from Lake Washington during the re-engineering civic projects of the early 20th century. For several decades it was the site of the Atlantic City Nursery which grew plants for city properties. When city horticultural efforts were consolidated elsewhere, a group of neighbors stepped up and laid out plans for an urban farm, one that would benefit many groups in the southeast Seattle community and beyond. Today RBUFW is run by Friends of the Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands, in partnership with Tilth Alliance. 

There are no individual plots at Rainier Beach. Instead, the land is managed in a way to promote education and advocacy, all while producing fresh produce for the benefit of the community.

In an interview, Sue Gibbs, a founding member of RBUFW, described some of the challenges the project faced in transforming the acreage into a working and welcoming space:

"We got money from a lot of different sources for our capital campaign. It was a big deal. And then it took a while to actually complete the construction because we had to go through the whole design process. And it was a complex design team, because there's so much going on here. We had an architect, an urban farm specialist, a wetland specialist. We finally chose Berger Partnerships, they're landscape architects. 

So we were on the upswing and then, boom!, the farm was closed for a while [for construction]. We had just planted a bunch of fruit trees the year before; they were still young and then they didn't get pruned and shaped. We had to rebuild the volunteer network, the staffing here at the farm, rebuild the Friends board. And that was starting to go really well, and then COVID hit."

Despite these challenges, the farm has been able to take shape, offering space and programs for a diverse community. On any given day there may be a group of East African elders working on their crops, a gaggle of pre-schoolers on a field trip, and young adults in the school district's Bridges Program learning vocational and social skills. The farm also offers a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program; in addition to paid subscriptions, CSA produce goes to various food programs. A children's garden and a U-pick area, a modern communal kitchen and meeting room -- all serve to fulfill the vision of the founders, in the words of Sue Gibbs, "a healthy, safe place for people to grow, live, and grow their families."

A tipi of scarlet runner beans makes a hiding place in the children's garden.

Marra Farm in South Park pays homage to the agricultural heritage of this community along the Duwamish River. At the often overlooked, extreme south end of the city, and sandwiched between Highways 99 and 509, Marra Farm is a recently developed green space in an area historically cultivated by Italian, Japanese, and Filipino families. 

Like Rainier Beach Urban Farm, Marra Farm serves a multitude of purposes, although the configuration is quite different. Various community groups co-exist at the site in a patchwork quilt of projects, each under the umbrella of the city Parks Department and the P-Patch Program which manages the site. While the players have changed over the years, the overall emphasis is one of empowerment for marginalized communities and for women. Some folks raise crops to sell; others farm for food to bring to the table. 

Y-WE Grow is part of a larger organization, Young Women Empowered, that offers a variety of teaching programs for female and nonbinary youth, ages 13-19. Solid Ground volunteers and students farm a large tract for produce which goes to feeding programs; a portion is sold at the local farmers market. Salsa de la Vida also sells produce at El Mercadito, the South Park farmers market. Salsa de la Vida is also part of a larger effort, Villa Comunitaria, to bring empowerment and leadership skills to Latinx immigrant communities, many of them women. In the Mien Community Garden, immigrants from Southeast Asian raise crops familiar to them with traditional growing techniques. One group, the Marra Farm Chicken Cooperative, keeps laying hens on the property in a special coop. A bee-keeping program is currently on hiatus due to vandalism and theft. 

It all began with a p-patch in 1997. In 2021 a major multi-year re-development of the surrounding area resulted in the opening of Marra-Desimone Park. Named for two historically prominent farming families, the park encompasses the p-patch and the various farming endeavors -- all adjacent to open space for recreation.

Signage at Marra Farm is often multi-lingual.

Thanks to Sue Gibbs for an oral history interview about RBUFW and to Julie Bryan and the Marra Farm Coalition for information on Marra farm.

Miles to Grow

The ventures mentioned here are only a taste of what's happening in community gardening in Seattle. We have yet to explore the Beacon Food Forest, Nurturing Roots Farm, also on Beacon Hill, the YES Farm at Yesler Terrace, the Danny Woo Community Garden in the International District, the UW Farm, the Nathan Hale Farm and other school farms, and all the programs of Tilth Alliance. Many of these enterprises aim to serve underrepresented groups, BIPOC communities, refugees, and young people. I hope to delve more into their history as the Seattle Community Gardening History Project moves forward.

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