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Have you always wondered about what it takes to put in a raingarden or cistern? Perhaps you've heard of the RainWise Program and have been curious about the rebate process? Or, maybe you haven't heard of either and would absolutely like to find out how to get a rebate on installing these fantastic systems that help prevent and clean up stormwater overflow? Now is your chance! Come visit us in Columbia City - we'll be there to answer all of the above for you!
 We are offering FREE CLASSES at CHOMP!! August 18 - 10am - 6 pm Marymoor Park CHOMP! is a new kind of County Fair. Join us August 18 at King County's Marymoor Park for a day of local food, live music, green living workshops, and activities for the whole family. Meet and interact with local farmers, community organizations, chefs and musicians in a family-friendly, completely free celebration of what makes King County great! CLASS #1: Delicious Rain Garden Plants – 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM Learn From Stone Soup Gardens Permaculture Designer, Marco Downs about how to incorporate delicious and beautiful plants into rain gardens at your home or community space. Our plant palette focuses on how to fulfill our clients’ needs with edible, native and wildlife habitat plants. We will talk through our favorites in those categories and provide space for questions about how best to work rain gardens into your plan. Great class for homeowners, contractors and designers who are looking to expand their palette. CLASS #2: Greywater 101 with Patrick Loderhose - 12:45 – 1:45 PM Greywater, water from sinks, showers, and washing machines, is a great source of irrigation and can greatly reduce your outdoor water use. Greywater systems are especially important in times of drought. Come learn about popular greywater systems from Patrick, who is a level 3 California trained greywater installer and designer. He'll teach you about design considerations, water saving potential, costs, regulations, health and safety, soaps and products, and how to choose a system that is a good match for your home and landscape.   Design a Rain Garden. Enjoy free food. Impact your community.
Creative and innovative middle and high school students are invited to help us design a rain garden for the amazing Paradise Parking Plots Community Garden. FREE, but registration is required so we can plan food and material! REGISTER HERE: goo.gl/oF7ckD During this two-day engineering design workshop, students will work with Paradise Parking Plots Landscape Designers Jake Harris and Marco Downs from Stone Soup Gardens to answer the questions “Where are the best places to put a rain garden in order to reduce stormwater pollution?” and “What types of plants should we put in the rain garden?” PART ONE: 1:30-3:30 Wednesday, March 28: Rain Garden Engineering PART TWO: 1:30-3:30 Wednesday, April 4th: Rain Garden Plant Selection WHERE: Hillside Church, 930 E James St, Kent, WA 98031 WHY YOU SHOULD ATTEND: 1. Get involved with your community & earn Service Learning Hours 2. Increase your knowledge of rain garden engineering. 3. Tour the amazing “Paradise Parking Plots” Community Garden. 4. Help reduce polluted stormwater runoff in Mill Creek 5. Enjoy delicious free food. INFO or QUESTIONS….? Contact Cassandra - cassandra@sustainabilityambassadors.org FREE, but registration is required so we can plan food and material! REGISTER HERE: goo.gl/oF7ckD A great big thank you to City People's Garden Store for hosting Jake Harris to talk about Raingarden plants and stormwater infrastructure in January! We had a few photos from the event that we wanted to share. Check our Education page for more great upcoming opportunities to connect and learn about plants!  Stone Soup Gardens will be speaking about how we create community and residential urban farms. We'll be showcasing some cool current and past projects including developing P-Patches, transforming a street into a community farm to supply the food bank, and turning a 2-acre parking lot into a community farm for refugees. Stone Soup Gardens would love to model our work as a career path for others interested in Urban Farming and will share some of our challenges and successes.
About the Urban Ag Food Summit: Do you enjoy gardening, science, local food and being outside? Curious about sustainability and permaculture? You won’t want to miss the Urban Ag Food Summit, a two-day event at Highline College. This year’s theme is Career Paths in Urban Agriculture. All activities are free and open to the public. Enjoy community resource tables with information and activities ranging from small business development to native pollinator habitat to permaculture. Experts will be available to talk about your ideas. Location: Highline College, Des Moines, WA - Building 8 For more information: https://www.highline.edu/event/urban-ag-summit/ Fall is here and we couldn't be more excited about our recent addition to the Stone Soup Family: The Starlight Hideout. Aptly named by our client's kids who are super stoked to have this little gem all to themselves. Earlier this year we built the fence in this backyard, along with a couple of raingardens in the front yard. For a look back on the project, click here. But first, I introduce you to our new treehouse:  Isn't it wonderful! So much fun to design and build, and a great tree to build it in. This hideout comes with a selection of fairies, a fairy nest, and loads of little charms to keep the parental spirits away. The raingardens in the front of the property are also looking pretty great with all of the recent rain we've received. Our clients opted for a nice mix of wildflowers, ground cover, and sedge to provide lots of colorful layers. Interested in having a treehouse build in your yard? Whether its for cats, chickens, children, or perhaps just for you - give us a call and we can get the ideas flowing.
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.  The sun has come out and our gardens are growing! Here is a look at one of our jobs last year where we installed a David Bowie mosaic flagstone patio into the garden. This was a great project with a large raingarden, we planted out the front rockery, and created a dog zone outside the front door with a gate and pet friendly plants. After all this rain, it is great to see the plants filling out, blooming, and coming into their own. Take a look at how it looked last year. How is your garden looking? Are you in need of any early summer maintenance? Stone Soup Gardens is here to help. Let us get your garden cleaned and primed for your beautiful summer enjoyment! Give us a call, or email our maintenance lead Jesse Barber at jesse@stonesoupgardens.com. Sometimes all it takes is a few well placed features to make the garden feel a more like home. With this lovely mid-century, drainage was a bit of an issue. The house sits at the bottom of a slope, and ends in a cul-de-sac. In order to alleviate this, we created raingardens on each side of the house in a couple of small pocket garden spaces. This will help funnel water and keep it from pooling in the yard. The raingardens will also filter the water from the driveway runoff which is essential since Lake Washington is just a short stroll away. We also installed a plank board fence and arbor along the west side of the property which will provide privacy and a safe play space for the kids, while creating an area for trailing plants in the shadier areas of the backyard. A lovely project, lovely clients, and a lovely home, what more could we ask for? Outdoor living is something we all strive for more of here at Stone Soup Gardens. One of our clients has realized this in a truly spectacular way. Having installed two cisterns a couple of years ago, our client came back with dream plans of building an oasis with a hot tub and outdoor shower to replace her existing uneven grass backyard. This spring we returned to put in a brick paver patio to connect the shower and hot tub, a sloping pathway, and a cute little corner raingarden. While it was a mucky and unpredictable time to create a level patio during the wettest spring season we've ever had, we think it turned out beautifully. It is one heck of a relaxing outdoor hideaway. |
This is how Stone Soup Gardens rolls - check out our blog for current, upcoming, and past projects, events, and other super cool stuff worth mentioning.
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