Last summer, I walked past a large patch of an array of plants in front of the Broadway Bound Children’s Theatre. The garden patch was right next to the U District farmer’s market. A little girl with garden gloves was tending to her 3 feet by 3 feet area in the garden. I asked her some questions regarding what the garden was about. She told me that this was a community garden. You pay a small fee each year to have your own garden area where you can grow your own vegetables. It suddenly struck me that I was living by the University of Washington where there were no large spaces for people to garden. I also remembered a time when I visited a site on Capitol Hill for a hypothetical development project for a class, and I saw on the side of the site, where it sloped, that neighbors has come together to clean up the weeds and make a garden. When I asked them what they were doing, they said they had joined together to clean up and make their “neighborhood” look nice. They had the developer’s permission to clean his site for no cost. I would have thought that the developer could have paid the neighbors a maintenance fee. As I look back on this patch of garden in front of the Broadway Bound Children’s Theatre in Seattle, I think about how a neighborhood bonds over a common interest.
More Information on the garden:
http://www.seattle.gov/neighborhoods/ppatch/locations/17.htm
