A garden is a space usually associated with a residence that contains cultivated plants such as trees, shrubs, flowers, herbs or vegetables.

Organic gardening is a way to grow vegetables without using toxic pesticides and fertilizers. It also promotes healthy soil.

Leona Griffith has planted vegetables and herbs near her South Seattle home for more than a decade, growing collard greens and kale in a series of plots at a local community garden.

During the summer months, her plot is a small-scale urban oasis, teeming with life and surrounded by other patches of green, tended by neighbors and friends who frequent the Leo Street P-Patch.

Griffith, the 75-year-old matriarch of the small public gardening space, learned how to tend a garden while growing up in the city’s Central District, where her parents grew and canned vegetables throughout her childhood.

“It’s served as a way to be self-sufficient,” she said. “We lived off the land.”

Griffith and thousands of other Seattle-area residents have for decades grown fresh vegetables and herbs in public gardening spaces known as P-Patches. Revered by residents, the program is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2023, marking the occasion with events and improvement projects at some of its 91 gardens throughout the city.

The program, which traces its roots to a single garden in northeast Seattle’s Wedgwood neighborhood, now provides space to over 3,600 gardeners across its roughly 34 acres citywide — enriching residents by engaging them in a productive pastime that improves their access to local and culturally relevant food.

Gardeners also give away much of their yield: In 2022, the program and its partners donated over 44,000 pounds of produce to area organizations addressing food insecurity.

At the same time, the P-Patches help those who frequent them develop self-reliance, promote environmental stewardship and build community, with each garden embodying characteristics of its neighborhood and the diverse cultures of its residents.

Gardeners often share tips for growing food and exchange cultural knowledge about their produce, which in many cases isn’t native to the Pacific Northwest — or even North America. Educational workshops are common, tools are shared and gardeners often see children running about as their parents tend to the family plot.

Griffith, for her part, occasionally plants alongside her daughter and granddaughter, bringing three generations together to pay homage to her family’s heritage by growing some foods her parents once harvested in Madison Valley.

“They planted with knowledge from our homeland that was passed down from generation to generation,” Griffith said.

A half-century of growth

One of the nation’s foremost community gardening programs wouldn’t exist if not for a neighborly ask some 53 years ago. University of Washington student Darlyn Rundberg acted on her inspiration for a small garden near her Wedgwood home, asking her neighbors if they could spare a corner of their small truck farm, which sold produce in the area.

The Picardo family obliged, and Rundberg got to work, planting beans, broccoli, corn and cabbage with help from students and families at an elementary school bordering the Picardos’ property. Her idea took off, and the Picardos leased the rest of their farmland to other gardeners seeking space within the city limits — eventually selling their land to the city as the national “back to the earth” movement picked up steam after the 1970 declaration of Earth Day.

Seattle officially designated the Picardos’ land as the city’s first community garden in 1973, naming the new P-Patch program after the family of Italian immigrants. The early years were rocky, seeing some gardens plowed over or lost to development projects as other social service programs took priority and city funding fluctuated.

But an advisory council founded in 1979 helped provide stability, and the P-Patch program took off over the ensuing years, growing to dozens of gardens by the late 1990s.

These days, the program lives under the city’s Department of Neighborhoods and is led by Kenya Fredie, a lifelong urban farmer who’s managed the development of community gardens in Seattle for the last 19 years.

The program runs on an annual budget from the city’s general fund, Fredie said, and the Seattle Housing Authority reimburses the costs of infrastructure improvements, interpretation services and other necessities at P-Patches on the agency’s property.

Fredie said growing up Black and Indigenous in a multigenerational household south of Boston gave her a unique perspective on what it means to connect with the land, as she learned how to grow vegetables from her grandfather and medicinal herbs from her mother.

“It’s always such a joy to see people walk through and just gain a sense of peace in these very urban, dense areas,” Fredie said.

She and other P-Patch leaders are working to address institutional barriers that have kept low-income people and people of color from having a fair chance to acquire a spot through the often-competitive application process.

Before the restructuring of guidelines to encourage more participation among diverse communities, about 27% of gardeners were people of color. But that figure almost doubled to 46% within the first year of the revised guidelines in 2022.

“It was a learning lesson for me because it made me realize that there are some voices in the program that are historically dominant,” Fredie said of the outreach efforts, which program officials hope to expand. “Our program needs to be more reflective of the diversity in the neighborhoods.”

For many gardeners, that diversity is central to their P-Patch experience.

Isaac Obezo, who gardens at Horiuchi Park in the First Hill neighborhood, said language barriers can’t obscure the warmth his neighbors show one another as they work side-by-side and exchange recipes in Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese and English.

“We just translate it back and forth using Google phone,” he said.

Most of the Horiuchi Park gardeners are immigrants who grow to feed their families, Obezo said. Their plots are filled with food from their home countries, he said, and the gardeners’ cultural exchange of recipes is particular to their shared space.

It’s rare for Obezo to go home without vegetables Asian elders give him in exchange for his help or something he grew, mostly herbs and peppers.

“It’s interesting to have a communal space where you can go and meet people you probably would never ever interact with and be around normally,” said Obezo, who also recently tried to grow luffa, a sponge gourd, yielding some tiny successes.

Obezo applied for his plot — a process that can take years for some gardens — in 2019 after volunteering to maintain the space of a neighbor who has disabilities and needed a hand.

The Horiuchi Park garden has raised plot beds for those who have difficulties bending over to tend to their plants, Obezo said, and residents are advocating for increased accessibility measures to better accommodate the many elders who use the space, as well as more funding for their P-Patch and others citywide.

“One of the things that really drives my appreciation for the P-Patch program is how much space they provide for people,” he said.

Source: seattletimes.com