Magnolia resident Jean Unger is in her 80s. She uses a walker to get around and is “a lot slower than I used to be.” Despite slowing with age, she still gardens twice a week at her plot in the Interbay P-Patch.
She was one of the original community members to create a garden in Interbay and has moved with the garden through its different locations since 1975.
Her 600-square-foot garden was built with a special raised bed, wide walkways and posts throughout, so she can leave her walker and work in the garden. Unger will lose 200 square feet of her plot with a new policy, which will force her to pay for new beds to be built to accommodate her disability.
Rich MacDonald, supervisor of the Department of Neighborhoods’ P-Patch program, announced new plot-size guidelines last December to keep up with p-patch demand.
To create the space, gardeners with plots outside of the maximum size for their garden will be forced to relinquish the extra space. Maximum plot size ranges from 50 to 800 square feet, depending on the garden.
P-patches are city-owned gardens for local residents use. There are 87 p-patches in Seattle. An annual fee is required for individual plots, with financial assistance available.
Unger was grandfathered in to her plot size in the mid-1980s. “I think they should honor promises made,” Unger said, “and take into account the usage of the space [and] the amount of food that goes to the food bank. It should not be an arbitrary decision.”
It’s a decision that’s been a long time coming, MacDonald said. It’s a way to bring everyone into compliance.
The gardeners were not involved in the decision. Even though it’s a community garden, it’s the Department of Neighborhood’s job to be stewards of the space, MacDonald said.
“We feel we’ve been giving people notice over the years that this kind of thing was coming down the pipe,” he said.
Forty-five people will need to give up their space in the first phase to be completed by the end of this year. The second phase — to be completed by the end of 2014 — will affect 60 immigrant and refugee families. The Department of Neighborhoods gave themselves an extra year to give enough warning and effectively communicate the new rules, MacDonald said.
Not all of the immigrant and refugee families will lose space, per se, MacDonald said. Some families have multiple plots in multiple gardens; the new rules will consolidate them into one garden. MacDonald wants to create “equity among gardeners at each p-patch and have a program-wide standard.”
Not all gardeners affected are upset, MacDonald said, but “no one wants to give up garden space.”
Stephanie Butow, a gardener at Picardo Farm P-Patch in Wedgwood, created a Change.org petition addressed to Mayor Mike McGinn and City Councilmembers Sally Bagshaw, Richard Conlin and Nick Licata to stop the mandatory downsizing. So far, the petition has 1,582 signatures, with 417 to go (as of press time).
The petition won’t affect the decision, MacDonald said.
Community gardening
Interest varies for the different p-patch gardens throughout the city. Sometimes people are able to get a plot right away; others wait up to four years. At the end of 2012, 1,300 people were on waiting lists for a plot in Seattle. MacDonald pointed out, 20 p-patch gardens were developed or expanded within the last year.
Butow, 55, began gardening at the Picardo P-Patch about 15 years ago. She has 2,200 square feet in different parcels at the Picardo garden. She started with one plot but took over others to garden for the food bank. An old policy allowed gardeners to have a plot for free if they donated the produce to the food bank. When that policy ended, Butow continued, paying the annual square-foot fee herself. Over the last 10 years, she estimates she has donated at least 2,000 pounds of food to the food bank. The mandatory downsizing will decrease donations to local food banks, Butow said.
During the summer, Butow spends anywhere from two to eight hours each day maintaining and harvesting the gardens. She is also an orchard steward for the p-patch and helps prune, maintain and harvest the fruit trees, berries and grapes — that produce is shared among the gardeners and donated to the food bank.
MacDonald warned Butow that a policy change was coming, and she received formal notice in December. She will be forced to reduce her plots to 800 square foot by the end of the year.
“We were told the decision had been made — it’s a done deal,” she said. “That did not sit well.”
Picardo gardeners are lucky, she said, because their plot sizes will remain relatively large. Butow is fighting for all of the gardeners at other p-patches, especially those who will need to comply with new “postage-stamp size” plot maximums of 200 or 100 square foot.
“What’s transparent about making a decision behind closed doors without any gardener input?” Butow asked. “What’s fair about taking space away from people who are following the rules?”
P-Patch gardens have two rules: The first is to maintain your plot, and the other is to volunteer eight hours in the garden each year.
“If you enforce the rules that you have, that would free up space,” Butow said. “Why boot people out? And all of that’s from the Department of Neighborhoods, who prides themselves on creating community.
“If they feel like they need to downsize, they should wait until people leave and use attrition, not eviction,” she added. “We hope the Department of Neighborhoods will return to participatory democracy and include us in the process and remember that we are the community in ‘community gardening.’”
Pride of ‘ownership’
It’s a sunny Saturday. Unger sits on the edge of her raised beds, picking green beans. Her husband will be there to pick her up in a few hours, and there’s never enough time to get everything done.
She wants the P-Patch Program to make an exception for her and her garden — one she feels ownership of, even though she doesn’t own it.
“Doggone it, I’ve earned the right to garden,” she said, mentioning her role in creating the garden all those years ago. “I have sympathy [for the situation], but just wait until I’m dead to take my garden.”
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