Garden Victory: Seattle Gardens on the Rise

A growing trend is sprouting in Seattle’s back yards, front yards, parking strips and porches, where urban farmers are tilling, tending and savoring bountiful crops

Amy Ockerlander, the garden hotline educator at nonprofit seattle tilth, handles many odd questions. But she was unprepared for the woman who called last spring—peak planting season in a climate where you can grow some vegetables year-round—to ask about raising a Sungold cherry tomato plant indoors. “She had a bunch of questions,” says Ockerlander. “‘What size pot should I use? What kind of soil?’ I tried to explain that the tomato may not do very well indoors because it really needed the outside wind and sunshine to thrive, and would need some pollinators to produce fruit.” Undeterred, the apartment dweller compromised, agreeing to keep the window open as much as possible and see what happened.

The call was a perfect example of the lengths to which Seattle residents have gone this year to join the urban farm movement, a national trend toward home food gardening that spiked when the Obamas agreed to plant a Victory Garden on the White House lawn. Most gardeners concur that 2009 is the year of the urban farmer. Several Seattle neighborhoods hosted their first edible garden tours this summer, showing off verdant city lots. Urban garden Web sites sprouted like radishes. City chicken-coop tours and miniature-goat classes were filled to capacity, and seed sales and garden magazine subscriptions went through the roof. “The renewed interest in food growing really started a few years ago, with the growth of sustainable neighborhood groups and eating a local diet,” says Ockerlander. “But it really kicked into high gear this year.”

“We’ve reached a societal tipping point,” agrees gardener Colin McCrate, co-owner of Seattle Urban Farm Co., one of the more established of several Seattle gardening businesses that cropped up recently to help homeowners grow food in their city yards. “It is almost stressful how much interest there is. We can’t really keep up!”

It’s a sentiment shared by many ambitious gardeners. There are diverse theories as to why this trend is peaking now: Most experts say the recession has inspired people to grow more food, although many beginning gardeners notice that the cost of start-up—yards of compost, lumber for raised beds, seeds, netting, hose attachments (and a straw hat)—rarely adds up to less than the outlay to buy produce at a grocery store for a season. Others say this is a natural outgrowth of the “eat local” movement, taking pressure off the need to truck everything from the country and consequently contribute to global warming. But the three urban farmers profiled here all stress their pleasure in being more self-sufficient, and all gush about the community that gathers when you grow food—everyone likes free raspberries and eggs!

We’ll never know what motivated the apartment dweller with the cherry tomato plant, but she might just become a poster child for our resourceful urban farmers. She checked back in with Ockerlander in early summer, looking for trellising tips for the plant, now a robust 4 feet tall and scrambling out the window.

>>continued with Sandy Pederson