Time to brag for a bit about my better half for creating a garden featured on King 5 News (our local NBC affiliate), and in Sunset magazine!
We’ve been budding locavores for a while now, having been inspired by books such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Fortunately, we live only a short distance from one of the only year-round farmers’ markets around, in Seattle’s University District.
This year, we wanted to take our own personal gardening to the next level. Problem is: we live in the city; we have a postage-stamp lot, of which the only part that receives a generous amount of sun is the park strip, where all the neighbors’ dogs pee as they walk by; and p-patches only give you a ten-by-four foot rectangle, cost money, and have a current waitlist of over 1,500 people.
Enter urbangardenshare.org. This gardeners’ version of match.com connects people who want to garden with people who have some extra space that they’d like to have a garden in, but don’t have the time or expertise to work the land properly. The home/land owner provides the space and water, the gardener does the labor, and they share the produce. Ingenious in its simplicity!
We were matched up with an outstanding family on Phinney Ridge (about a mile from our house) who had a vacant lot adjacent to their house, back from the road, gently sloping toward the south (ideal for sun exposure) with four and a half pre-terraced beds about three feet deep by twenty feet long. My Master-Gardener wife couldn’t have asked for a more perfect canvas on which to work. The month of April involved ground prep and preparing starts in the windowsill of our dining room.
Our daughter Fiona (who turned three at the end of July) was an all-star helper and pupil through the whole journey, developing a healthy distaste for dandelions, and learning to emulate her mother’s gardening prowess in other important ways. We gave her free rein to eat anything she wanted out of the garden—a privilege she embraced with open arms. Snap peas were an especially big hit. What an awesome way for her to develop an appreciation for fresh veggies, the labor that goes into growing them and the pride of enjoying something she helped to cultivate.
Some of our bounty: from tiny tomatoes to humongous carrots, lots of leafy greens, strawberries, radishes, beets, and tomatillos for salsa.
(In case you’re wondering, we weren’t actually harvesting carrots and canning salsa as early as August. Some of these pictures were added at a later date.)
The Sunset featurette (July 2009) with the urbangardenshare.com founder
Synaptic Mosaic 