Category: Edible Plants

Soul Food: Creating a Space for Immigrants and Refugees to Grow

5/17/2018

Article By Hannah Kett, The Nature Conservancy - Cities Program Manager
Photo by Hannah Letinich

A year ago, the parking lot at Kent Hillside Church was just that — a parking lot, with moss growing on the cracks and an almost constant stream running along the bottom of it. Today, it is hard to picture what it used to look like. Now, it is now home to 50 garden plots, four cisterns, a tool shed and blossoming community.

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Depave Party!

7/10/2017

Paradise Parking Plots is hosted at Hillside Church in Kent and is a project with World Relief Seattle. The goal is to transform 2 acres of parking lot into a community farm for the surrounding refugee population which will become a hub for community building through food. Designed by Stone Soup Gardens, Paradise Parking Plots will be a powerful demonstration home to the first raingardens in Kent, will capture part of a 30,000 square foot roof into large cisterns, and will help to turn a natural spring into a habitat pond. (The stream currently runs across the pavement and into a storm drain.)

On June 23rd, Stone Soup Gardens employees went to the first Depave project to help create a garden paradise! Marco, our designer, Patrick, our crew lead, Susan, our Office Manager, and Jake - our esteemed leader headed off to pick up a shovel and lend a few hands.

Here is a look at the overall property before the depave. (The parking lot we were working to remove is the rectangular lot below the church building. )

Thanks to Turner Construction, their fabulous employees, their awesome heavy equipment, tools, and safety gear, along with other volunteers from World Relief Seattle, King County Conservation District, and Hillside Church, we were able to remove most of the asphalt from the parking areas, and put it into large dumpsters to be hauled away.

Great job everyone! We are looking forward to seeing this as it progresses. Check out this article from King 5 about the project.

De-Pave Paradise and put up a Community Garden

6/15/2017

Paradise Parking Plots is hosted at Hillside Church in Kent and is a project with World Relief Seattle. The goal is to transform 2 acres of parking lot into a community farm for the surrounding refugee population which will become a hub for community building through food. Designed by Stone Soup Gardens, Paradise Parking Plots will be a powerful demonstration home to the first raingardens in Kent, will capture part of a 30,000 square foot roof into large cisterns, and will help to turn a natural spring into a habitat pond. (The stream currently runs across the pavement and into a storm drain.)

On June 23rd, they are hosting a volunteer party led by the employees of Turner Construction who will be de-paving and releasing the earth from the confines of asphalt. It's going to be ground breaking! They are asking for additional help from the community to aid in this work, all are welcome and there is much to do. Please RSVP to Tahmina Martelly at TMartelly@wr.org so that enough safety gear and lunch can be provided.

This weekend!

6/8/2017

Tilth May Edible Plant Sale with Chicken Cuddling - next weekend

4/27/2017

Our favorite event of the year is next weekend! Come buy some beautiful starts from Tilth, say hello to your Seattle community, and cuddle some chickens with Stone Soup Gardens. We'll be on site with our lovely flock o'birds who are just a flutter with the cuddling possibilities. Come and get your garden on. We can't wait to see you.

The Great Berry Wall

3/31/2017

With Seattle being hilly, yard space is often sculpted around unusual terrain. We see this fairly often, and find many owners that are at a loss on how to take full advantage of these uneven spaces. As well as being difficult to envision, the spaces are generally hard to tame, manage, or manipulate into something worth enjoying.

Stone Soup Gardens loves these kinds of challenges. Whether you have a steep slope, a soggy pit, or a hilly blackberry divide, we can turn your unused space into something for you and your family to enjoy. We can create a functional area for growing edible plants, or create a level retreat for those sunny spring and summer days.

One of our clients in Columbia City has just such a space. While the yard area itself is fairly level, it is raised up sharply on a hill overlooking the street, and the backyard was a bramble patch. Seeing the unused potential of the area, our client contacted us to see what we could do. Hence, the great berry wall came into play.

The great berry wall was built using downed timber from a local contact. We had the majority of the logs cut to a specific size, while others we trimmed to create easy step access in and out of the raised bed. This allows for ease of picking as the berries come into season, as well as for watering and pruning once summer and fall roll around.

We planted the raised bed out with different types of raspberries, strawberries, gumi berries, lingon berries, thimbleberry, chilean guava, lavender, and sage, as well as espalier apples and pears, chives, and red flowering currant in other parts of the yard. This means that there will be a good selection of plants that stay green throughout the year, as well as those that will shed their leaves during the winter. It also creates a nice color palette for the eyes, as well as flavors for the mouth!

For a bit of flare, we also included a bike wheel arbor along the front wall of the house, which was a great way to add interest, while providing a surface for things to climb on. We installed a laundry to landscape greywater system in the front yard which will water the espalier trees and herbs, and in the backyard we installed a cistern to side sewer which will provide water for the raised bed in the backyard.

Take a look at the project beforehand:

And here it is now:

This Weekend - King County Native Plant Sale

3/10/2017

Walk-Up Sale
Saturday March 11, 2017 9 AM- 3 PM

Location:
King Conservation District (west parking lot)
1107 SW Grady Way
Renton, WA 98057

Payment:
Cash, Visa, Mastercard (sorry no checks)

Plants Available for Purchase: http://kingcd.org/programs-native-walk-up-sale.htm

Fall in the neighborhood

10/28/2016

Recently we've done a few client check-ins for maintenance and boy are things looking good! Fall is a wonderful time for raingardens. They certainly do flourish with all the wet. Here is a little peak at one of our long-time clients' garden spaces. The place looks great!

Interested in seeing what the space looked like before? Check out here, here, and here.

Front Yard Sprucing

6/23/2016

In 2014, our clients asked us to do a compete renovation on their backyard. We installed a stone patio, hugelculture beds, mushroom beds, and did a general clean up of the yard. This year, they asked to come back and do some sprucing in the front yard. While the yard is small, they've done a lovely job creating more interest in the front with the recent painting of the house.

To create more visual interest, we created a nice stone wall along both sides of the driveway. We added some new edibles such as huckleberry, blueberry, lingonberries, and mulberries. Not to mention artichokes, wild ginger, an Italian plum, lavender, echinacea, and more. This layering of plants will be a nice touch of color, and will also tie in nicely with the new house color. To finish, we added a new gate to the backyard and put in the trough for containing those wily herbs. A fun little project, to be sure.

Delectable Edibles

12/16/2014

We often have clients who request specific things for their gardens. Many times those requests are purely functional or perhaps budget related, but sometimes we get really awesome suggestions.

For this garden, we were asked to incorporate a number of unique edible plants in order to appease the inquisitive nature of the fruit loving child of the household. Our designer, Kelly Sullivan of Botanique Flowers, did a wonderful job including lots of wonderful plants including Chilean guava, a cherry tree, an apple tree, blueberries, huckleberries, gooseberries, and more! We also incorporated a small hugelcultur bed in the front yard with herbs and strawberries, as well as a small winecap mushroom patch.

To help enjoy their new front yard oasis of edible goodness, we put in a lovely patio space, a couple of raised bed troughs for vegetable growing, and planted out the parking strips in the front and sides of the house. These parking strips are full of aromatic, drought tolerant plants that will do well in our northwest summers and winters. They are also pollinator friendly, which will bring all the bees and hummingbirds to the yard.

I'm excited to see the bounty in the coming years, as we look forward to maintaining and sustaining this delectable edible garden space.

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