Tania Galvan, 8, and Gregorio Alvarez, 9, collect wood shavings to add to a worm bin their Concord Elementary class helped replenish at Marra Farm in Seattle's South Park area. The activity is part of a children's education program offered by Lettuce Link, a local group that also helps facilitate fresh produce donations to area food banks.
Concord Elementary student Devin Jackson, 8, washes up before participating in a nutrition class Lettuce Link offers at Marra Farm in Seattle's South Park neighborhood.
Concord Elementary students trek back from checking their garden plots in the children's garden at Marra Farm in South Park. They're among 150 children participating in a gardening education program at the farm where Lettuce Link has a one-acre Giving Garden.
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Garden Partners: New Web Site Pairs Green Thumbs with Plot Owners
As the days lengthen and temperatures increase, eager gardeners across Seattle look forward to another season puttering among their vegetables and ornamental flowers.
Some people look to area P-Patches when they lack outdoor space or want to expand their own backyard garden. But in the Emerald City and surrounding area, garden plots are prime real estate, and wait lists can be long.
Eager to help solve that supply-and-demand dilemma, a new Seattle-based Web venture called Urban Garden Share is now pairing up would-be gardeners with those who have the garden space but lack time or energy.
Amy Pennington, who runs an edible gardening business, came up with the idea for the online resource while taking a course at Seattle Tilth. The concept sprouted as she chatted with a few of the students who, like herself, didn't have garden space. In weeks that followed, Pennington poked around the Internet and found resources were lacking to connect gardeners with landowners.
Pennington is one of the thousands of people waiting for a plot in Seattle's P-Patch Community Gardening program. The system has 68 garden locations totaling 23 acres, with 1,850 plot holders. Already there are 1,600 people on the wait; some in neighborhoods like Queen Anne have been on it for two or three years.
Desperate gardeners may be willing to drive to garden space outside Seattle, but even P-Patches in Kent and Auburn are over capacity.
Urban Garden Share (www.urbangardenshare.com) lets people post requests for garden space or offer up their own land. You can search by garden size and gardener experience, and the site is organized by neighborhood – a feature geared toward minimizing the miles folks have to drive to get to their gardens away from home.
“It would bum me out if a bunch of people in Ballard were driving down to Georgetown,” Pennington says.
From the site’s launch on March 1 through mid-April, about 100 people posted listings and more than 3,000 visitors checked it out, and traffic seems to be picking up, Pennington says. There have been five matches already, including one woman in Ballard who converted her entire lawn and brought in five gardeners.
“It works well in an urban space where the need for green space is there – it's just under utilized,” she says.
Lettuce Link: Harvesting Volunteers to Benefit Food Banks and Children
By Melanthia M. Peterman
Hovering around a picnic table at Marra Farm in south Seattle, third-graders from Concord Elementary School chatter nonstop as they smear soy butter over celery and place raisins in wonky lines atop the spread.
The well-known snack of “ants on a log” is a childhood favorite, and today it serves as a teaching tool for a nutrition lesson provided by Lettuce Link, a local program that also provides organic produce to food banks in the Seattle area.
Lettuce Link is part of the nonprofit Solid Ground, founded back in 1974 as the Fremont Public Association. Lettuce Link started out in 1988 with a goal of connecting P-Patch gardeners to food banks, says Michelle Bates-Benetua, Lettuce Link’s program manager. Another part of its mission is to encourage people to grow their own food by offering free seeds and gardening classes at food banks.
Today, Lettuce Link coordinates volunteer efforts (volunteers chip in roughly 4,000 hours of work a year) to grow food for food banks at about 30 different P-Patch gardens as well as backyard gardens scattered throughout the area. Last year, the program yielded more than 22,200 pounds of fresh produce.
Lettuce Link suggests people grow at least one row of fruits or vegetables and that they plant just two extra crops, such as beets, carrots, green onions, herbs, lettuce, pak choi, radishes or squash. Lettuce Link volunteers are asked to wash and bag their produce for easier distribution, then take it to the nearest food bank.
“Our goal is to engage the community, making that connection between that community member and a food bank,” Bates-Benetua says.
Lettuce Link also partners with the organic gardening group Seattle Tilth and coordinates about 100 volunteers to harvest fruit from area trees that otherwise would go to waste. Last year, those efforts brought in almost 14,000 pounds of fruit that was donated to the needy.
“We link community volunteers’ passion for gardening and fruit-tree gleaning to the emergency food system, thereby improving access to fresh organic produce, seeds and gardening resources for Seattle residents living on a limited income,” Bates-Benetua says.
The program maintains a one-acre Giving Garden at Marra Farm in the city's South Park neighborhood. Last year, the garden produced 14,000 pounds of produce that went to people who had lined up at food banks, meal programs or shelters in the Seattle area. In addition to food, Lettuce Link supplies more than 1,000 food bank clients each year with seeds, plant starts and gardening resources.
Spring and summer are the busiest seasons as food production ramps up, says Bates-Benetua.
“Luckily, we have a wonderful, strong and fabulous volunteer base who make it all possible,” she adds.
Volunteers also help facilitate Lettuce Link's nutrition and gardening education program for children in the South Park community. They work with about 150 children from Concord Elementary and other nearby schools. Bates-Benetua says students typically care for their own small plot for the season, and learn about soil, worms and nutrition.
“We cook together from the garden, so they learn a bit about seasonality and that eating healthy can be fun,” she says.
So on the spring day that the third-grade class from Concord made “ants on a log” at Marra Farms, they also refreshed two worm bins.
While the snacks were nice, the 8- and 9-year-olds eagerly jostled for position around two wheelbarrows to mix newspaper, leaves and sawdust for worm bedding. It was picture day at school, yet they hesitated for only seconds before delving into a pile of soil to hand-pick worms, centipedes and potato bugs to add to the new bins.
Digging in the dirt was high on 9-year-old Heather Parong's list of favorites, as evidenced by her grubby pant legs and dirty hands. “We got to discover all kinds of different bugs ... like the centipedes had a hundred legs.”
Become a Lettuce Link Volunteer
There are many ways to lend a hand through Lettuce Link:
• Plant and harvest vegetables to be donated at local food banks or spend time working at the Giving Garden at Marra Farm at 9026 Fourth Ave. S., Seattle.
• Share gardening know-how with food bank clients or help distribute seeds and starts at food banks. Lend your knowledge and help with the children's program at Marra Farm.
• Donate fruit from your trees Lettuce Link's Community Fruit Tree Harvest project. Register your trees by calling the Garden Hotline at 206-633-0224 or e-mail help@gardenhotline.org. Volunteers will come and harvest the trees. Or you can help from July to September by picking fruit from Seattle-area trees.
• If you're bilingual, help translate at Lettuce Link events. The greatest need is for Spanish and Russian translators.
