KCD has prepared a self-guided tour map of Hügelkultur sites across King County, and one of our Stone Soup client gardens is on the map! Now the Hugel-curious can see different forms of Hugelkultur (from urban to rural, from in-ground to raised containers). Visit 6 of the 10 sites and receive a Hugelkultur t-shirt (while supplies last).
Click here for the map! 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. Every month Stone Soup Gardens takes our employees somewhere for an educational experience. Sometimes this is a wander through Kubota Gardens, or a hike along a trail, or visiting one of our vendors to hear more about the work they do. Whatever the case, we've had some great times learning and skill building together. This month, we got to see one of our heroes in the industry, Ron Finley, who was featured as a speaker at The Well at Queen Anne Methodist Church. Here is a short blurb about Ron: Armed with a shovel, some soil and seeds, Ron Finley has come to be known as the "Gangster Gardener", and his unexpected tactics have made him one of L.A.s most widely known activists. Frustrated by his community's lack of access to fresh, organic food, Finley inadvertently started a revolution when he turned the parkway in front of his South Central L.A. home into an edible garden. When the city cited him for his plantings, Finley started a bureaucratic battle, gathering signatures and working with local officials until the archaic city ordinances were abolished. His TED Talk has been viewed by more than six million people to date. With so much momentum behind him, he began to focus his energy on The Ron Finley Project, which has ignited a horticultural revolution worldwide. His latest undertaking is a permanent space that serves as a garden, café, educational center, park and community gathering place. Ron Finley doesn't mince words, he isn't shy about speaking about injustices nationally as well as locally, and he does it all while being personable, relatable, and open to listening to the community he is surrounded with. Want to learn more about Ron? Watch a trailer for - Can you Dig This - a movie which explores the urban gardening revolution currently taking place in South Central Los Angeles which is one of the largest food deserts in the country. It follows the inspirational personal journey of five 'gangster gardeners', including Ron, all planting the seeds for a better life. Or, better yet, if you are visiting L.A. sometime soon, go see Ron in person! He hosts an Airbnb experience so that you can see first hand the transformations happening in South Central L.A. As Ron likes to say, "Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do....(plus you get strawberries.)" Our work at Alleycat Acres Wetmore Garden project is still underway. Since this is a volunteer and community led job, we could use your help! Alleycat Acres hosts work parties at Wetmore the last Saturday of the month, which is this coming Saturday, May 27th from 10 am - 2 pm. Come on out and get your hands dirty and help create this awesome gathering space, garden plots, trails, and urban food forest.
Questions? Want to find out more? The Wetmore Community Farm is coordinated by Kyla Rudnick and community liaison Annalisa Moore. You can reach them here: Kyla@alleycat-acres.org and Annalisa@alleycat-acres.org. Volunteer work party at Wetmore Community Gardens Saturday, May 27th - 10 am - 2 pm Corner of Wetmore Ave S and S Estelle St, just off Rainier Ave S. (map) http://www.alleycat-acres.org/wetmore 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. 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.
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. 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:
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