GARDENING

High Country News -  On a warm October day, volunteers gathered at the New Holly P-Patch, a community garden in South Seattle’s Othello neighborhood, for one of the year’s final harvests. Over the past few weeks, calendula flowers, marigolds and ground cherries — a fruit akin to a small, sweet tomatillo — had filled the garden beds, ready to be picked. In the southeast corner, corn stalks, planted earlier in the summer, towered 15 feet high.

A block east, cars whooshed down a busy neighborhood thoroughfare. But near the garden, single-family houses lined the edges of a peaceful, tree-lined street. Just to the south, children rode their bikes on the sidewalks and ran in a grassy field.

New Holly is an affordable housing development whose residents are primarily East African and Southeast Asian immigrants. The New Holly P-Patch was established as a community garden by the city of Seattle in 2002, but until last year, many of its beds had been neglected for years. Thanks to the efforts of volunteers organized by Black Star Farmers, a Seattle-based coalition that encourages the city’s communities of color to grow their own food, nearly all the beds in the P-Patch were now producing vegetables, herbs or native flowers. In some, people from the surrounding community had started growing soybeans, garlic, brassica and squash. The coalition hopes that eventually, neighborhood residents will take care of all the beds.