How do you move a garden? Part one: The Sand Point P-Patch

Part I: Sand Point

In an earlier post, we described the loss of a P-Patch on 27th Avenue NE near Eckstein Middle School. Some of the gardeners from 27th Avenue were able to acquire plots at the Sand Point P-Patch approximately two miles east along Sand Point Way. This property, too, fell 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.

Farming Tradition on the Sand Point Peninsula

From the early 1900s small farms could be found dotting the Sand Point Peninsula in the northeast sector of the greater Seattle area along Lake Washington. In the early 1910s, a group of Japanese farmers formed a collective community at the south end of the peninsula. This group included the parents of Gordon Hirabayashi, who was born at Sand Point in 1918. The Hirabayashis and others decided to move south to Auburn, but other Japanese families stayed on.





The circa 1925 photo above, courtesy of Densho, shows the Uyeji family on the porch of their home just off Sand Point Way. This property is approximately where the federal archives building now stands.



Photos in the Puget Sound Regional Archives property records document several Japanese homes that were confiscated and torn down early in World War II to make room for Naval housing in support of the Sand Point Naval Air Station. The families were, of course, removed to internment camps. This property was just north of NE 65th Street, where condos stand today.





The Kroll insurance map printed in the early 1940s shows the property that had been leased Japanese farms, the Orth and Gilbert 10-Acre Tracts. The northern section became the Sand Point P-Patch in the 1970s. The area pictured was not annexed by the city until 1942.

Revival of Farming

The Sand Point P-Patch took shape in 1977, early in the days of the city's P-Patch program. It was located on the site of old navy housing associated with the Sand Point Naval Air Station. (Some say it was quonset huts.) The structures had been pulled down, though remnants remained in the form of foundations and apple trees. Neighborhood children remember playing in and around the foundations of the old housing in the 60s. The abandoned railroad tracks immediately adjacent to the property were pulled up in the mid-70s and officially became the Burke Gilman Trail in 1978. Naval Station Seattle still occupied the peninsula to the east, across Sand Point Way, although flights from the base ceased in 1970.

At some point, the tract had been transferred to the U.S. Forest Service, a division of the Department of Agriculture. In 1982 the feds declared the land surplus. Various entities expressed an interest in it; when the dust cleared Children's Orthopedic Hospital (now simply Seattle Children's) emerged as the owner in 1984. However, it would be another 17 years before the hospital decided on a use for the land. During that time, the P-Patch continued to operate under an annual lease arrangement.

In 2001 the Sand Point P-Patch, which had occupied the site for nearly a quarter century, fell victim to the common theme of "temporary use." The hospital decided to move ahead with  development in 1998 and notified the gardeners that they would be ousted. Some in the p-patch community protested their eviction, asking for a small portion of the land to remain as a garden and even touting the therapeutic benefits of a garden for patients. 

When it became clear that the p-patch could not remain on the hospital grounds, the city offered gardeners the chance to create a new, larger patch across the street at Magnuson Park, the former navy base. Rather than simply giving up their hard-hoed plots and starting afresh, 33 of the 50 patchers decided to move their gardens bodily -- plants, soil, and all. What followed was a coordinated effort between the gardeners, the parks department, and the hospital to make this happen.

P-Patch Manager Rich Macdonald wrote to the team in charge of the development of the park:

"The Sand Point Naval Station is a logical site for relocation of the garden. Only at Sand Point is sufficient space and sunlight available to permit the P-Patch gardeners to design and build a beautiful new garden with their usual public amenities. community gardens have bee proposed previously for Sant Pint, although with the [imminent] loss of the present P-Patch, the need is greater than in the past." (Rich Macdonald to Sand Point Operations, City of Seattle, June 19, 1998, Seattle Municipal Archives)

Diagram of the Sand Point P-Patch in 1986. Courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives.

Choosing the Site

Magnuson Park is huge and, in 2000, was much less developed than it is today. Three p-patchers who happened to be employees of NOAA next door to the park undertook the task of selecting a suitable site for the new garden. They found it on a sunny hillside that had likely been constructed from the rubble of old runways that had run directly below it. They tested the soil to make sure it was healthy. 

Marty DeLong was the volunteer coordinator for the move. She describes how the new garden became much more than a simple P-Patch:

"The old place was a "P-patch." This had to be a "community garden" because it was inside the park. And that's why we have the children's garden. We have native plants, we have the native plant nursery. We have the orchard. Those things were kind of insisted upon."

Moving a Garden

So how does one move a garden? It may not be as simple as staking out a new patch and starting over. Dedicated gardeners will want to move their plants, artwork, trees and shrubs that define the garden, and, perhaps most importantly, the soil. Gardeners interviewed for this project stressed the importance of retaining soil that they had built up over years with judicious application of compost and soil amendments. 

"So in the fall of 2001 -- the hospital was wonderful. They sent their grounds crew over with big flatbed trucks because we dug up all of our plants that we wanted to take over. And then we thought we could dig up some of the little trees and we couldn't! So they went back to the hospital and got their big -- whatever they're called -- and dug them up. We took the cherry tree that was there because someone had died in the garden and it was the memorial cherry tree. We took a lilac, we took a pear, we took a fig, and then just lots of perennials that we had here and there." (Marty DeLong)

A bit of negotiation with the hospital regarding the soil turned out to be a win-win situation.

"They had to remove soil to level [the ground], The contractor was going to have to take the soil up to Everett to dump it. We had worked on that soil for years. We made a deal. They could haul it across the street and save them 60 miles round trip. And we get the soil that we had been enriching over all these years.

So they were wonderful. And we meanwhile had been busily digging up our own personal gardens. And then we took everything over, and there's kind of a little swale beside the garden that's now part of the native plant nursery, but nobody was there then. And we put all our plants there and covered them with straw because it was the fall." (Marty DeLong)

Kathy Dugaw was also involved in the move and in setting up the new garden at Magnuson. The timing of the move -- right after the events of 9/11 -- is something that sticks in her mind:

"Right after 9/11. Yeah. Easy to remember. Oh, and it was, it was so strange walking over there. I mean, 'cause it was deadly quiet because usually we're in a traffic pattern for the planes and there were no airplanes or anything like that. It was weird." (Kathy Dugaw)

Today the Magnuson Community Garden is a showpiece consisting of seven different components: an orchard, a native plant border, a native plant nursery, a tranquil garden, an amphitheater, a children's garden, and the p-patch which now has plots for 140 gardeners. Much more can and will be said about the diversity of talent and volunteerism that went toward creating this special place.

Magnuson P-Patch, summer 2022.

Seattle Children's 70th and Sand Point Administrative Building stands roughly where the Sand Point P-Patch was located. The main hospital campus is approximately two miles to the south.

Nothing remains of the old p-patch; however, a bench and plaque on the Burke Gilman Trail immediately adjacent to the old garden at the corner of NE 70th commemorates one of the stalwart gardeners. Maxine Wolfheim suffered a fatal heart attack while gardening.

Thanks to Marty DeLong, Kathy Dugaw, and Mark Huston for oral history interviews.

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

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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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