"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.
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