Seattle's Victory Gardens

Victory Garden at Seattle Children's Home, 1944. Courtesy MOHAI, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Photograph Collection, 1986.5.7817.3, photo by Ed Watton.

From victory gardens to p-patches, Seattle has a long history of community gardening. A straight line links the victory gardens of old with the p-patches, community gardens, and pandemic gardens of today. In particular the idea of vacant land as an untapped resource continues, although such unused plots are harder to find today than they once were.

During World War II a cooperative “Victory Garden” was developed in the heart of Seattle’s Ravenna neighborhood, not far from today’s Ravenna Community Center. According to a piece in The Seattle Times, the garden was “serving seven families for a cost of only $3.58 each.” What that amount represented or how it was calculated is not stated.

Victory Gardens abounded around the Seattle area, as they did throughout the nation at war. Framed as a way of easing the strain on the country’s agricultural resources while ameliorating the privations of war on family households, gardening was equally a way of channeling patriotism – something that could be done on the home front.

Most gardens were small scale, home-based efforts which served to supplement household provisions during a time of food rationing. Such was the garden of the Gibbon family in the Pritchard Island neighborhood of Southeast Seattle. However, Americans were also urged to make use of vacant lots, a project that would no doubt take several families working in cooperation, such as that at Ravenna.

Rosetta Gibbon and son Gary tend their victory garden on the shores of Lake Washington, c. 1943. Photo courtesy of Rainier Valley Historical Society.


Victory gardens cropped up on corner lots, in schoolyards, at public housing projects, and on army bases. Some corporations sponsored gardens next to their plants. Japanese Americans planted victory gardens in the camps where they were incarcerated during the war, while their farms and greenhouses back home in the exclusion zone were turned over to others to raise essential vegetables for the war effort.

An ambitious suggestion for a victory garden plan, courtesy of the state of Illinois.

In 1943 Orrin Hale, chair of the Seattle Civilian War Commission’s Victory Garden Committee called for registering vacant parcels throughout the city:

“There is a great deal of vacant property in Seattle that could be made available for victory gardens to people living in apartments, or homes built on small lots. We are appealing to owners of this property to turn their lots over for cultivation this year.”

The World War II Victory Garden was not a new idea. Similar efforts were made during The Great War although on a smaller scale. The terms “war garden” and “liberty garden” were used often at that time.

Women's Work

While all able-bodied civilians were encouraged to support the war effort, the target demographic for war garden work was women, particularly housewives and mothers who were less likely to become Rosie the Riveters. Government agencies, the media, and businesses all found a new appreciation for women as part of the war effort and as consumers. Seattle was no exception

“Women are being urged locally to interest themselves generally in the movement for more and better gardens. While gardening under normal conditions is essentially a man’s job, and every man with the right spirit and with facilities for gardening will roll up his sleeves and get busy, much depends on the women of this city and of the nation to make the greatest success of the movement for war gardens.” (SDT March 17, 1918)

The tone changed little two decades later. Newspaper advertisements featured attractive slacks-clad women planting and hoeing under headlines such as “Every Practical Housekeeper is planting a 1943 Victory Garden.”

Nurseries and “seed dealers” were quick to jump on the bandwagon, offering to “instruct housewives in growing vegetables in home gardens” and coming up with creative packages of seeds, tools, and instruction booklets for the patriotic gardener. And, of course, fashion could not be neglected. A 1943 “article” advertised Frederick & Nelson’s “At Home Week” (“A Thrilling Event Keyed to Victory”). The article features a photo of a smiling young woman wielding a trowel in Frederick & Nelson’s miniature victory garden (third floor.) “Wearing nail-head studded denim jeans, gay plaid shirt and sturdy Mexican huaraches, Mrs. Philip Bronson ‘digs in for victory’.

Seattle Daily Times, March 19, 1943.

Interest in home-grown produce waned after the war as women returned to traditional gender roles and food shortages decreased. However, by the 1960s a back-to-the-earth movement brought a resurgence of community gardening and laid the groundwork for the start of Seattle's P-Patch Program in 1973.

This post is a part of the Seattle Community Gardening History Project. 

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Farming Revival in the Rainier Valley

"Inch by inch, row by row, someone bless these seeds I sow." 

(The Garden Song, David Mallett)

Today the landscape of Seattle is dotted with tiny gardens called P-patches, as well as several larger urban farms and orchards. Rainier Valley is no exception; a number of vacant lots and underutilized spaces have been converted to meet the growing desire for freshly-grown produce and the need for food security. Some of these spaces are dedicated to the newer groups of immigrants and refugees who have settled in the valley.

The City of Seattle, through its P-patch program, and the Seattle Housing Authority have made concerted efforts to provide gardening space for newcomers. Many of these families come from farming backgrounds and a space to plant and harvest familiar foods is a way to ease the transition to their new home. 

Rainier Valley also boasts a demonstration orchard in Hillman City, as well as the Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetland, developed on the site of the city’s old Atlantic City Nursery, and the showpiece Bradner Gardens Park.

Whimsical art at Climbing Water P-Patch

A patchwork of patches

More than a dozen P-patches are scattered around the valley. The big housing communities at NewHolly and Rainier Vista each offer several parcels of land for gardening. In addition, each community provides a farm stand where gardeners may sell their extra produce. (These are currently closed to the COVID pandemic.) The Hillside P-Patch near Franklin High School is farmed by Cambodian immigrants on a steep incline that was once part of the Vacca Farm and served as "cheap seats" for kids wanting to watch games at Sick Stadium. Climbing Water, named for the adjacent hill-climbing Cedar River pipeline, is a narrow, terraced garden sandwiched between apartments that recalls the hillside gardens of the old Italian residents of Garlic Gulch. The Thistle patch, one of the oldest and largest in the city, provides 77 plots for East Asian immigrants and others in Rainier Beach. And the smaller NewHolly 29 Avenue garden serves East African, Southeast Asian, and Chinese American residents of the NewHolly community. 

Longtime gardeners Plekeao and Mansak Douangdala came to Seattle in 1981 from a refugee camp in Thailand after fleeing communists in their home country of Laos. They first started gardening on a plot of land provided by Our Lady of Mount Virgin church. Many years later, Mansak discovered an overgrown parcel of land on Estelle Street and began to mow the city-owned property. Now the couple cultivates a large garden plot at the Estelle Street P-patch where they raise bitter melons, eggplants, yam root, taro leaf, onions, peppers, corn and mustard greens.

Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands, 2022

Farm in the city

In 2010, Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands was established on the site of a defunct city nursery in the Pritchard Island neighborhood of Southeast Seattle. The 11-acre nursery, which grew plants for the city's parks and utility properties, occupied the land from about 1937 to 2010. Some old greenhouses and sheds remain. Atlantic City Nursery and neighboring parkland existed on land reclaimed from Lake Washington when that body of water was deliberately lowered in 1916 by the opening of the Ship Canal. Much of it is still wetland. The neighborhood, no longer an island after the lake lowering, was also at one time the site of a Duwamish Indian settlement.

Today, RBUFW is run as a cooperative garden and educational farm in a partnership between the City of Seattle, Tilth Alliance, and Friends of the Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands. There are no individual plots at Rainier Beach. Instead, the land is managed in a way to promote education and advocacy, all while producing fresh produce for the benefit of the community.

In an interview, Sue Gibbs, a founding member of RBUFW, described some of the challenges the project faced in transforming the acreage into a working and welcoming space:

"It was a complex design team, because there's so much going on here. We had an architect, an urban farm specialist, a wetland specialist. We finally chose Berger Partnerships, they're landscape architects. So we were on the upswing and then, boom!, the farm was closed for a while [for construction]. We had just planted a bunch of fruit trees the year before; they were still young and then they didn't get pruned and shaped. We had to rebuild the volunteer network, the staffing here at the farm, rebuild the Friends board. And that was starting to go really well, and then COVID hit." (2022 oral history)

Despite these challenges, the farm has been able to take shape, offering space and programs for a diverse community. On any given day there may be a group of East African elders working on their crops, a gaggle of pre-schoolers on a field trip, young adults in the school district's Bridges Program learning vocational and social skills. The farm also offers a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program; in addition to paid subscriptions, CSA produce goes to various food programs. A children's garden and a U-pick area, a modern communal kitchen and meeting room -- all serve to fulfill the vision of the founders, in the words of Sue Gibbs, "a healthy, safe place for people to grow, live, and grow their families."

1952 aerial showing the old Atlantic City Nursery. Courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives, Don Sherwood Parks Collection.

A refuge for all

The site of Bradner Gardens Park has seen multiple layers of use. When Bradner P-Patch in the Mount Baker neighborhood was founded in 1987 it still had school portables on the grounds from the time it was used as a middle school annex (1971-1975). Until 1993 the structures were used by a nonprofit, Central Youth and Family Services. And prior to all of that it had been the site of  the Quinsite-Bradner housing project (1942-53), emergency housing for veterans returning from World War II and the Korean conflict. Some folks still recall these "temporaries" around town that lasted much longer than the five years planned. 

Originally set up to provide space for Mien refugees from Laos in the 1980s, the Mount Baker garden overcame a serious threat. Long-time gardener and activist Joyce Moty described how the neighborhood banded together to protest the city’s decision to sell the land in the mid-1990s:

 “The Southeast Atlantic Community Association – we had a two-year battle with city hall over trying to save this piece of land from being sold for market rate housing. And we went to the mayor's office, talked to city council people, trying to say this is really not a good idea to sell this land, but we were just citizens.” (2021 oral history) 

Ultimately, the group was instrumental in getting an initiative titled Protect Our Parks passed; the 1996 law states that the city may not sell park land without replacing it in the same neighborhood. Today Bradner Gardens Park offers a children’s garden, demonstration beds, a bee colony, art installations, and basketball hoops, in addition to its 61 P-patch beds.

Bradner Gardens, 2021. The garden on Mount Baker hill enjoys a view of downtown Seattle. Sadly, the community building seen at right was damaged by arson a few years ago.

This post is a part of the Seattle Community Gardening History Project. Thanks to Mansak Douangdala (interviewed by Nancy Dulaney), Joyce Moty, Sue Gibbs, and Valentina Barei for their oral history interviews.

What's in a Name? The Kirke Park and P-Patch

Every garden has a story. Tucked into a quiet neighborhood of Ballard is a garden with a particularly unique back story: The Kirke Park and P-Patch.

    

Remnants

Those with a basic understanding of Germanic languages will recognize that the word Kirke means “church.” The park was given a Norwegian name to honor the Scandinavian heritage of the Ballard neighborhood. However, there was a more specific reason for the name: Kirke Park sits on the site of a religious community that once occupied the property for nearly 80 years – not a traditional house of worship as one might find in many neighborhoods, but the residence of a millennialist sect known as the Seventh Elect Church in Israel. Founded in 1922 by a 77-year old preacher, the church dictated chastity, vegetarianism, unshorn hair, and an unquestioning obedience to the authority of its founder, Daniel Salwt. Tall, imposing, with a long-white beard, Salwt ruled over a group of several dozen adherents who handed over property and money to his use, including a parcel of land on Ninth Avenue Northwest Avenue in Ballard.

Thanks to research carried out by the late Barbara Hainley and other neighbors, we know quite a bit about Mr. Salwt, a charismatic, itinerant preacher from the Midwest who arrived in Seattle in 1910 at the age of 65. Attracting followers from among the mill workers and other laborers, he gathered the “elect” to the Ballard property. To house the faithful, he moved (or possibly tore down and rebuilt) a wooden hotel or rooming house to the site, a structure he had also been given. A second, smaller building followed. There, with promises of eternal life, his followers lived communally, turning over their wages to the church and growing vegetables on plots assigned to them. Members also tended fruit trees, berry bushes, and ornamental flower beds. A tradition of gardening and self-sufficiency was established.

When Salwt died at the age of 84 in 1929, church members, believing he was an incarnation of Jesus and that he would rise again, refused to turn over his body to authorities until threatened with legal action. In the following decades a dwindling number of men lived on the church property, the last two dying in the millennial year 2000. The gardens were maintained, at least sporadically. An article in the Seattle Times from 1970 noted that while the church buildings were “somewhat run-down, the extensive flower gardens are neat and well tended.”[i]

            The name SALWT, laid out in bricks, was still to be seen when plans for the park got underway. Photo courtesy of architect Clayton Beaudoin.

End Times

The world did not come to an end, as Salwt had predicted; however, his church did. By 2008, the legal entity that was the Seventh Elect Church was heading for dissolution and the heir to the property was ready to sell. Neighbors had had their eyes on the property for some time and successfully lobbied the city to purchase the land for a small park. With funds from the 2000 Pro Parks Levy and the 2008 Parks & Green Space Levy, the decrepit buildings were torn down and a multi-use park designed by landscape architect Clayton Beaudoin of SiteWorkshop. The park includes a playground, an open meadow, a 31-plot p-patch, a large giving garden, a communal strawberry patch, and many “secret” nooks and crannies.

Kirke is one of our city’s newest parks, dedicated in 2012, but its history is evident in more than just its name. A plaque explains the unusual story of the property. Several concrete foundation walls that were to support a temple that was never built have been reshaped and repurposed to create the illusion of a walled secret garden. The garden shed, designed and built by neighbor and gardener Jennifer Hammill, mimics a picturesque chapel. A few shrubs and trees original to the church’s garden have been retained, including an espaliered apple tree and roses. Beaudoin recalls that “there were many elements that created a sense of ‘ruins’ and we heard many requests to maintain the magic and mystery of the place.”

Friends of Kirke Park, a group of neighbors and gardeners, coordinates garden activities – both work parties, including a Spring Cleanup, and purely social events such as the annual summer Hot Dog Party. Interested community members are invited to contact the Friends by sending a message to kirkeparksea@gmail.com

Kirke Park is located at 7028 9^th Avenue N.W. in Seattle.

 

This post is a product of the Seattle Community Gardening History Project. A version of this story was published in the GROW P-Patch Post, Spring 2022.

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[i] Seattle Times, May 6, 1970, A9. Other sources for this story include an oral history interview with Jennifer Hammill, correspondence with Clayton Beaudoin, and an article by Barbara Hainley titled “The Seventh Elect Church in Israel: Seattle’s ‘Long-Haired Preachers,” published in Communal Societies, Journal of the Communal Studies Association, 35:2 (2015).

Losing Ground: Seattle's Lost Patches

Over the course of a half century, Seattle has developed well over 100 p-patch gardens. Not all have survived. Too often, patches have suffered by being labeled “interim use.” The pressures of urban development coupled with rising property values brought down a number of gardens. Other succumbed to social conflict, both external and internal, and other factors. Today we will look at a few of the patches that were forced to close permanently and the circumstances behind the closures.

Jackson Place

In 1995 the Jackson Place Community Council applied for and received a modest grant from the Department of Neighborhood’s Matching Fund Program to establish a p-patch. The grant application spoke of “the opportunity to beautify our community, take advantage of one of the numerous vacant lots, and have a focus for developing and fostering neighborhood friendships and pride in our community.” The street corner lot was located at 16^th Avenue S. and S. Weller Street on the western slope of the city’s Central District. Former P-Patch Program Manager Rich Macdonald remembers it as “a little garden with a little view. It was really pretty.” Unfortunately, only six years later the owner of the property, a food processing company, terminated the lease likely due to dissolution of company assets preparatory to becoming inactive. Today the corner is a parking lot.

The loss of Jackson Place did provide an added incentive for the build-out of the creatively designed and named Climbing Water P-Patch, just two blocks to the south on a steep slope adjacent to the Cedar River pipeline. Climbing Water was established in 2006 on land leased from HomeSight, an affordable housing developer, and with the support of the Jackson Place Community Council.

                        The short-lived Jackson Place P-Patch. Courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives.

                                            Steep and narrow Climbing Water P-Patch

Beacon Avenue P-Patch

On Central Beacon Hill, around the corner from the Beacon Avenue thoroughfare, a small community garden sits tucked away from the street behind heavy shrubbery on S. Graham Street. The land is owned by the adjacent Bethany (formerly Beacon Avenue) United Church of Christ. The property had been gardened for some time by members of the church, but -- in an effort to expand the gardening base in 1993 -- the church agreed to turn over management of the garden to the P-Patch Program. The relationship endured for thirteen years, but ultimately came to an end in 2005. The garden faced obstacles that included its placement between private properties and lack of any street frontage, making it difficult for patchers to deliver materials to the garden. Layered on top of this were ongoing personality conflicts between several gardeners whose disputes were left to program staff to mediate. Ultimately the city decided these difficulties and the resulting fall-off of interest in gardening made effective management impossible.

Some years later, in 2016, the garden space was turned over to a nonprofit organization, Nurturing Roots, which has created a small urban farm complete with gardening workshops, communal meals, chickens, and a commitment to social and environmental justice. Nurturing Roots leases the property from Bethany Church.

Chickens at Nurturing Roots Farm

Angeline

Perhaps the most heartbreaking loss was that of Angeline P-Patch, a garden that existed for a scant 18 months. Angeline and Ferdinand were two gardens established by the city in the summer of 1982 on vacant land under power lines on Beacon Hill. The patches were intended to serve Southeast Asian refugees, many of whom had settled in the area. Families from Laos and Cambodia had been violently uprooted from their homes due to fallout from the Vietnam War. The new patches were the city’s first effort to find land for these one-time farmers to cultivate and grow some of the vegetables of their homeland. Angeline was offered to ethnic Mien families.

Unfortunately, the best laid intentions ran afoul of culture clash. A few neighbors of the Angeline patch orchestrated a campaign against the garden, calling it a public nuisance. The Beacon Hill Community Council became involved. Concerns ranged from children playing in the street to vermin to newcomers washing their cars on the street and asking for favors from residents, such as use of a telephone (in the pre-cell phone era). One neighbor complained that the garden was messy and weedy, likely not recognizing Asian vegetables or understanding the Mien practice of letting plants go to seed in order to preserve the seeds for future planting. Possibly the greatest concern was the habit of the Asians to work in their plots late into the evening, even after dark with the help of flashlights. From the perspective of 40 years, it becomes clear that cultural practices on both sides were in conflict. A few isolated incidents, compounded by language barriers, likely led to an overblown reaction from a few neighbors.

P-Patch staff spent most of 1983 struggling to address the concerns of the neighbors while also working with the gardeners to curb some practices. In the summer of 1983, one of the most disgruntled neighbors hired an environmental consultant firm to test the garden for suspected vermin infestation, harmful bacteria, and human waste. None was found. Unfortunately, it was too late to save the garden. By autumn, the efforts were abandoned and the garden was set for closure at the end of the year.

For the 1984 growing season, families who wished to continue gardening were assisted to find plots at the Ferdinand patch a few blocks away or at the more distant Thistle P-Patch in Rainier Beach.

Site of the Angeline P-Patch returned to nature

NE 75^th Street and 27^th Avenue NE

In 1978 the P-Patch program was able to lease a parcel of land downhill from Eckstein Middle School in Northeast Seattle for the low low price of $85 per year. Sometimes known as Hillside, sometimes as Ravenna Hillside, but generally referred to now as that garden where the skinny houses are, the 16-plot patch lasted for a decade. The land was owned by a retired couple who lived in Okanogan County. Upon the death of the husband, the wife made the hard decision to sell the land noting that she was “sorry to see the Pea [sic] Patch go.” 

The tale of 27^th Avenue demonstrates the risk of siting p-patches on private land. With only a short-term lease (generally one to three years), gardeners run the risk of being uprooted at almost any time.

Plan of the Ravenna Hillside P-Patch

Sand Point

Some of the gardeners from 27^th Avenue were able to acquire plots at the Sand Point P-Patch approximately two miles east along Sand Point Way. This property, too, would fall to development, in 2001 making way for a new facility for Seattle Children’s Hospital, the owner of the land. However, unlike some gardens mentioned here, the Sand Point P-Patch did not die, but was moved wholesale across the street to Magnuson Park. The story of that heroic effort is told here.

This post is a part of the Seattle Community Gardening History Project. 

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