Seattle Community Gardening History Project

In Part I of Digging In , I wrote about the early history of school gardens and student gardeners in Seattle. In Part II, I'll look at the new wave of school gardens and explore a few around town. The Orca Garden at Columbia School, undated. Courtesy Rainier Valley Historical Society. The Edible Schoolyard In 1995 Alice Waters, chef and educator, launched an innovative project in partnership with a Berkeley elementary school: the Edible Schoolyard. The project was well publicized and caught on: schools around the country started garden clubs and small garden patches. A new generation of families, steeped in the liberal ideals of the sixties and the seventies, explored alternative teaching methods outside the standardized academic curriculum. The school garden as a tool for nature study and food culture was revived.  Annalisa LaFayette remembers getting her first taste of gardening at a garden club at the old Denny Middle School in West Seattle in the miid-nineties:  "It was on...

When we engage children in harvesting our gardens -- when we teach them about where their food comes from, how to prepare it, and how to grow it themselves -- they reap the benefits well into the future. (Michelle Obama, American Grown) In recent years renewed interest in environmental education and child nutrition has led to an increase in the number of horticultural gardens at Seattle's elementary and secondary schools. Advocates of outdoor classrooms hail the conversion of asphalt jungles into green spaces. While this may seem like a relatively new phenomenon, in fact, gardening has been a part of school programming going back a century -- with peaks and valleys in interest along the way.  Early 20th Century: The School Garden Movement Children take to the hoes. This likely staged photo shows what may be the beginnings of a 1918 war garden adjacent to York School (now John Muir Elementary) in the Rainier Valley. Courtesy Rainier Valley Historical Society. The early 20th century ...