Photo courtesy Erinn Hale
I found some dirt on a few Green Lake green thumbs. Last Saturday, May 8, 2010, about 250 volunteers got down and dirty for Spring into Bed, Seattle’s first city-wide food garden building day. Leading the pack was Stephanie Snyder.
As an AmeriCorps member, Snyder ran GRuB’s Kitchen Garden Project in Olympia, which builds gardens for low-income families each Spring. She has since moved to Green Lake and continues her work through Spring into Bed.
The concept for Spring into Bed grew after one of Snyder’s friends encouraged her to start something similar to the Kitchen Garden Project for Seattle.
“We were going to do something small, but Michael, my husband, got wind of our plans and said, ‘No, this has to be big.’,” she said. “So he sent an email out to everyone he knew and we organized some community meetings.”
The meetings brought, well, fruitful results. People wanted involvement from food banks and others passionate about food justice–that everyone, rich or poor, should have adequate access to healthy food.
In the months leading up to garden-building day, volunteers put up flyers around the city and tabled at community events. They went to food banks to get families signed up for a garden.
Their hard work certainly paid off. On May 8, 9 gardens were built at eight sites, which included families’ backyards and a church. Volunteers also worked on three community gardens, including one at the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC).
“We also asked folks to garden in solidarity with Spring into Bed by adding their square footage to our garden map,” Snyder said. “If you count those into the mix, we tallied [more than] 3,000 square feet of gardens built in Seattle in a single day.”
If they are well cared for, lettuce should be ready by early summer. The rest of the fruits and vegetables would follow.
It sounds like the gardens are already receiving some TLC. Erinn Hale, one of the garden-build captains, said she went to the DESC for a follow-up.
Photo courtesy Erinn Hale
“One of the residents who was more shy about participating in the garden build was watering the plants, one gallon of filled juice containers at a time. Although there’s an accessible hose and key to turn on the water right next to the beds, he was working on his own time, providing his own care.”
Spring into Bed, however, wasn’t the only thing that grew that day. It seems to me that everyone who participated in garden building, whether it was filling the frames, planting seeds or even pulling out blackberries (which the 80 middle-school students did–yummy), the feeling of pride in helping others developed and friendships formed.
The story that stood out most to me was that of an older woman who suffered from schizophrenia and shared her experience in the garden.
“When her children were young, they were taken from her and one was put in the custody of her mother,” Hale said. “When her mother fell ill, had a stroke and passed away, she couldn’t find much reason to keep on living. She lived on the streets for seven years in an attempt to self-destruct when DESC found her.”
Snyder said the woman saw volunteers building the garden beds, but the woman was scared of bugs (I’m not surprised–I am too). She went down and checked out the gardens anyway.
“They gave her gloves and she worked in the soil,” Snyder said. “By the time it was was time to plant, she was ready to get her hands dirty. She removed her gloves and put her hands in the soil. This experience brought her back to the time when she was giving birth to her children–a time when she was sane and happy about her life… Her story is just one of many who will continue to grow in many ways.”
