Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland has a cheerful dream for her city.
“I would like Tacoma to be known nationally as the city with the most community gardens per capita in the United States,” she told 150-plus diggers and weeders at the Pierce County Community Garden Summit last weekend.
To that end, and to cheers from the crowd, Strickland announced that Tacoma will make seven parcels of city-owned land available as gardens. The people who live near them will have chances to decide how to use them.
But wait, there’s more: Tacoma and the Cascade Land Conservancy will hire a community garden coordinator who will help get the growing going, and who will give a boost to community gardens in unincorporated Pierce County as well.
This is great news.
As Strickland noted Saturday, community gardens grow community along with the pole beans. Neighbors get together and trade advice, plants and news. Blighted spots become beautiful.
Gardeners work out their standards and ground rules. They decide on whether they’ll go organic, or allow Tagro and Miracle-Gro. They take responsibility for treating one another, and expensive hoses, with respect. They work out which produce goes home, and how much goes to food banks.
Folks save money on fresh food. They cut car trips to the grocery store. They get exercise, and the pleasure of working in the sunshine.
Kids, even teens, learn the difference between a tomato off the vine and one under plastic.
Kids who work in the gardens have the satisfaction of making their neighborhoods prettier and happier, and that’s a powerful vaccination against getting involved in criminal activity.
These gardens can cut health care costs, and, even better, steer people away from the criminal justice system.
Against all odds, they encourage government agencies to get over their turf. Taxpayers expect them to work together to support the green evolution.
And gardens harness huge volunteer support.
After the talks, those 150 people grouped themselves by neighborhood.
They learned how Andy Mordhorst and Frank Blair got permission and support to convert the old playground at Manitou Community Center into a garden. It sent 500 pounds of food to food banks, and fed people who worked on and visited it. The Manitou neighbors brainstormed how to maintain and expand it.
Residents of Hilltop celebrated the fact that the longest-tilled community gardens in Tacoma are still growing there. They shared information on new projects, including two aimed at getting schoolkids growing food. And they considered shortening the distance between food and tummies.
They’re out to redefine parking strips. The mind-shift starts with renaming those fallow plots between road and sidewalk. They’re planting strips now.
Last summer, an enterprising urban horticulture star grew corn next to a St. Joseph Hospital parking lot. There were peas and beans and flowers and arbors all over the Hilltop.
Those were random adventures. The effort is more intentional now. A senior woman who has knee trouble is getting help with building a container garden. Peace Lutheran Church hosts a seed exchange after worship services. People are building raised beds to prevent people from parking illegally on the strips.
Stacey Emerson of Midland brought two small-space garden ideas home to her asphalt-surrounded apartment. Between straw bales and a spiral garden made of topsoil, compost, leaves, cardboard and rocks, she’ll have lettuce by May and zucchini by August.
All these gardeners honored their fellows as the rock stars they are. And not just because they’ve dug and hauled so many rocks.
They praised Terry Carkner for proving with Terry’s Berries that agriculture can be sustainable, and profitable, in Pierce County.
They gasped when Mother Earth Farmer Carrie Little told them that during World War II, Tacomans’ Victory Gardens grew 40 percent of all the fruits and vegetables consumed locally.
They were amazed to hear that in the 1960s, Tacoma had 70 community gardens, and a paid staffer to help manage them.
Since then, Washington State University’s Master Gardener program has been training expert volunteers.
They’re ready to let the sun shine on a new generation of community gardens.
Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677
kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com
garden locations
The City of Tacoma will help develop community gardens on city-owned property at these sites:
• North 45th and Orchard streets
• 57th Avenue Northeast and Norpoint Way
• South 12th and Stevens streets
• South 25th and Grant streets
• South 85th Street and Sheridan Avenue
• South 48th Street and Yakima Avenue
• Portland Avenue and Wright Street
In addition, it will continue to support community gardens in Kandle and Franklin parks and on Proctor Street.
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