Urban farming sprouts in Seattle

Outside Mary Heim's house, between the sidewalk and street, is a rectangular strip of dirt -- part of her long-standing war against mowing the lawn.

She applied for a permit to remove grass and two sickly trees in the strip next to her Wallingford yard, hoping to replace it with blueberries and salad greens her family could eat.

But city transportation officials told her to plant her edibles elsewhere, citing a potential traffic hazard and other concerns.

Heim, 54, relented, and is now planning to plant flowers and ornamentals.

"The city's not going to go out and be garden narcs, and good on them for having better things to do," she said. "But I'm not going to go out and be a total scofflaw."

Instead, Heim wants to lobby for a change in city policy -- part of a burgeoning neighborhood "sustainability" movement. With the cost of groceries -- and driving to the supermarket -- on the rise, more Seattleites are colonizing overlooked urban nooks and crannies to grow food.

Employees of a busy Ballard bank are planting a garden next to the drive-through. Homeowners with yards are hooking up with apartment or condo dwellers looking to grow tomatoes. Others dream of creating an "archipelago" of tiny urban farms that could sell items to restaurants or consumers.

Some Seattle officials are pushing for a citywide inventory of public land that could be used to grow food, potentially including parks, land under power lines or even future reservoir caps. A similar effort in Portland -- called "The Diggable City" -- started four years ago.

"To me, that's something we should be doing -- the idea of culling all of our surplus land and seeing if there are places we could open for P-patches or lease for agricultural use," said City Councilman Richard Conlin, who sponsored a recent resolution supporting local farming and access to healthy foods.

There are 1,500 people on the waiting list to get a plot in a Seattle P-patch or community garden.

But other public spaces are controversial, such as the planting strips adjacent to streets often owned by the city but maintained by homeowners. In leafy Seattle, it's the only place in some yards with enough sun to produce vegetables.

But the Seattle Transportation Department, which technically requires homeowners to get a street-beautification permit before planting anything there, discourages people from growing food. Among the potential problems: crops tainted with automobile and stormwater pollution; bushy plants spilling into the street; creating a haven for rodents and pooping dogs; and potential complaints ranging from vegetable theft to unsightly dead cornstalks.

Heim had carefully considered those pitfalls, selecting low-growing blueberries to comply with city requirements that plants be no more than 2 feet tall. She also planned to incorporate prickly bushes to keep dogs and animals away from her greens.

Rick Sheridan, a Seattle DOT spokesman, acknowledged there's no clear regulation prohibiting small-scale farming in planting strips but said the city agency considers it a last resort.

	Seattle P-I

"We really would prefer that people do that on their own private property where we think the conditions are more conducive to safely growing edible plants in an area they can control," he said.

The department, however, has not done studies or sampling to determine whether there are health risks to growing in planting strips, Sheridan said. And plenty of people garden on the sly without permits.

The confusing advice and lack of definitive information, some say, isn't helpful.

"We've gotten kind of a mixed message from the city," said Cathy Tuttle, a founder of Sustainable Wallingford, a group whose mission includes growing more food in the neighborhood.

She rattles off the benefits: building community, reducing greenhouse gases from trucking food, stretching budgets and even keeping neighborhoods more resilient in the face of emergencies and shortages.

"If you're a thoughtful person and look at the news these days, you think, 'Maybe I am going to have to grow potatoes,' " Tuttle said.

Other residents are interested in helping connect homeowners with spacious yards and those who want to grow food but have no land. It's already happening sporadically through Craigslist, social networking sites and conversations over the back fence.

For more than two decades, gardener Griggs Irving, 71, has had a rotating cast of yardless gardeners growing purple broccoli, winter parsnips, sugar beets and a bounty of other vegetables in terraced beds behind his Wallingford cottage.

"I've got a lot of space here; more than I need," he said. "There's this wonderful cornucopia of food. ... The garden is lush, I learn a lot, and we all learn from each other."

Drive-through gardening

Maggie McKelvy, manager of HomeStreet Bank's Ballard branch, read an essay on growing your own food last month. Lovely, but impractical, thought the busy single mother who lives in a townhome with no yard.

Shortly afterward, she looked out the bank window and saw a south-facing landscaped bed, roughly as big as two parking spaces. It was an unlikely location to inspire thoughts of dinner, next to the bank's drive-through lane.

But McKelvy saw no reason it couldn't become an employee P-patch -- an idea enthusiastically embraced by co-workers.

After getting permission from the corporate office, they moved the drought-tolerant plants growing there. Customers donated topsoil and gardening advice. On their off time, the bank employees began building raised beds and starting seeds at home. They plan to start planting vegetables there this week.

"This has been fabulous for morale here," McKelvy said. "I feel lucky that I work in a place where ... we have enough flexibility that we're allowed to step outside the box."

As Seattle grows more dense, some argue the city needs more creative ideas to persuade developers to incorporate green spaces, natural habitats and food production into urban neighborhoods,

Architects at Mithun have envisioned a high-rise farm they designed for a downtown Seattle lot. It's completely theoretical, with airy south-facing greenhouses, chicken farm, cafe and rooftop gardens arranged amid affordable housing made from shipping containers.

It's designed to start a conversation with builders and policymakers, said Stephen Antupit, urban strategies designer for Mithun.

"There are some developers who are interested who get it," he said. "The leading thinkers are the ones who really understand you're not just trying to build a box but trying to add places that are valuable to people."

The local-food resolution passed by the City Council directs the planning department to research incentives for developers to include space for food gardens in apartment or condo projects.

There are already plans to add food cultivation to the list of benefits developers can use to meet landscaping and open space requirements, said Alan Justad, spokesman for the city Department of Planning and Development Services.

'It's an experiment'

To those with a keen eye, there's still fertile ground to be found within the city limits.

In Zach Zink's Capitol Hill neighborhood, there was too much concrete. And people he met through sustainability groups were more interested in theoretical alternative energy ideas than manual labor.

Then he heard about a quarter-acre plot in West Seattle -- a former communal garden on private land that had long been abandoned.

Zink, a former organic farm intern who now works at the Pike Place Market, got permission from the landowner to cultivate it again. Seven households worked to replace the chest-high grass with sugar snap peas, mustard greens, squash, kale, Swiss chard, zucchini, tomatoes and melons.

"Over here, I found a lot of people who were just interested in digging in and physically working to make their neighborhood more sustainable, not just talking about it," he said.

For now, they're just planning to grow food for their families. Eventually, though, the co-op might produce enough to sell to local restaurants.

Zink's fantasy is helping create a network of mini-farms wherever people can scrounge available land: school sites, churches, fire stations, yards.

In Portland, entrepreneurial growers such as City Garden Farms have pieced together enough intensely cultivated urban plots to sell at farmers markets, online and through weekly produce subscriptions. With the mantra "the more we grow, the less you mow," they've so far reclaimed eight backyards throughout the city for commercial agriculture.

"It would be great if we could find a couple smaller projects to tackle next year to try and keep turning lots into gardens," Zink said. "I don't know how much food we could grow for how many people -- it's an experiment."

URBAN FARMING RESOURCES

Longfellow Creek Garden:

longfellowcreekgarden.blogspot.com

Seattle Urban Farm Co.:

seattleurbanfarmco.com

Sustainable Seattle Neighborhood Links: scallops.sustainableballard.org

Portland's "Diggable City" Initiative:

portlandonline.com/osd/index.cfm?c=42291&

SPIN (Small Plot Intensive) Farming:

spinfarming.com

Portland's City Garden Farms:

citygardenfarms.com