Community gardens thrive in Snohomish County

Sunflowers are drooping their heads. Squash vines are covered with powdery mildew. Tomato plants have nearly had it.

Summer is over.

No one would ever know it, however, watching Lee Fulford and her 6-year-old daughter, Lilly, frolicking in their garden.

They're still enjoying their first harvest.

“These are Atomic Red carrots,” Lee Fulford said, holding the soil-speckled roots with her bright-eyed daughter standing by.

Because the Fulfords live in a condo with no space to plant vegetables, they walk to the new Mukilteo Community Garden, where they tend plot No. 6.

“Every day we have something to bring home to eat,” Fulford, 44, said. “Every day.”

The Mukilteo Community Garden, established in April by volunteers on a lot once covered with tires and blackberry vines, is one of at least a dozen new gardens created in the past year to satisfy a growing interest in food gardening in Snohomish County.

Though some of the new gardening spaces cater to specific groups or raise produce exclusively for food banks, many allow members of the community to rent space.

Lee Fulford paid $35 to rent a 4-by-8-foot raised vegetable bed, which she and her daughter dug by hand in the spring.

Lilly was in charge of selecting her crops as well as weeding and watering them with her mother's help. She planted celery, carrots, squash, Walla Walla onions, green beans, basil and green peppers.

Though the Fulfords supplemented their bounty with grocery store produce, their garden has yielded innumerable life lessons for Lilly.

Homegrown food has become nothing short of a seed-to-supper miracle for Lilly, so amazed and proud that she brought a crimson carrot to school.

“Some of her friends couldn't believe it, that she actually grew it all by herself,” Fulford, a single mother, said. “For a 6-year-old to share the process with others is pretty amazing.”

All this gardening is a dream come true for Sharon Collman, a Washington State University Snohomish County Extension educator.

Last winter, responding to the down economy and dramatic demand for vegetable gardening information, Collman hatched a new program along with another extension educator, Bick Hang.

Their aim: Train people in Snohomish County to grow their own food. Then let those people train more people.

Though no money had been set aside for the last-minute program, Collman pushed forward, calling on volunteers with the Snohomish County Master Gardener program.

She also hooked up with volunteers from already-established community gardens in Everett, the grass-roots group Green Everett and the newly formed organization Everett Tilth.

The Snohomish County Master Gardener Foundation set aside $10,000 for community garden grants.

In January, volunteers and the extension pulled together a conference for people interested in gardening for food.

They called it “Growing Groceries.”

Nearly 200 people showed up.

Then, using $1,000 from the WSU Snohomish County 4-H program to pay speakers, volunteers and the extension held monthly classes for gardeners willing to become mentors.

Those mentors returned to their communities to offer classes. Some started gardens.

Other gardens by other groups started up on their own, too.

In Snohomish, volunteers from churches, the local garden club and master gardeners established multiple gardens on private and church-owned property.

In Stanwood, master gardeners and other volunteers built a community garden at the Stanwood Camano Community Resource Center.

In Everett, new community gardens have blossomed in the Lowell and Port Gardner neighborhoods.

In south Everett, Hang expanded the family garden at a preschool run by the Volunteers of America-Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program.

In Marysville, volunteers with Bethlehem Lutheran Church and the Marysville Healthy Communities Project came together to create the Wilcox Farm Community Garden.

In Mill Creek, the city is searching for a location for a community garden to open next spring.

Perfect timing

Collman believes the time was right for social change.

“There seems to be a new wave of hope, maybe fueled by need-and-greed fatigue,” Collman said.

“We were poised at just the right point, at the crest of the wave with resources in place to be able to move fast to and ride it to the shore.”

The effects of the Growing Groceries program have been significant at local food banks.

At Jennings Memorial Park in Marysville, for example, master gardener volunteers converted numerous ornamental demonstration gardens into food-growing areas.

They have produced nearly 3,000 pounds of fresh produce, all for the Marysville Food Bank.

In 2008, the same garden donated 600 pounds.

It couldn't have been a better year to be ambitious with vegetables, said master gardener Lois Brown, president of the Mukilteo Community Garden.

Multiple heat waves blasted the county, giving a dramatic boost to sun-loving crops.

“You could hardly go wrong,” Brown said. “The tomato crops are just astounding. We've got tomatoes coming out of our ears.”

While some have attributed the food-growing movement to an unemployment-driven economy, others point to a growing desire for local, organic, sustainably raised and safe produce.

For Fulford, it's more than that.

She's teaching her daughter about nutrition, exercise, nature, empowerment and giving back to the community with homegrown donations to the local food bank.

On Saturdays, the Fulfords are in charge of watering four beds at the garden dedicated to the local food bank.

“She'll probably garden her whole life going forward from this,” Fulford said. “The fantastic part about it is you meet other folks in the community who share your interest.”

Gardening veterans mentored the Fulfords.

“You have master gardeners there who give you free information. You're dealing with experts,” she said. “It's pretty powerful.”

Starting young

Helping especially young children learn gardening is the mission at the preschool garden in south Everett, which serves ages 3 to 5, including many Latino children as well as the kids from Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese and Vietnamese families.

Despite school not being in session, the gardens, incorporated into the school's playground, thrived under the care of parents and volunteers from the Growing Groceries program.

Hang taught classes on how to cook food from the garden, including cheese enchiladas stuffed with collard greens and kale, rhubarb salsa, sauteed radish leaves and bok choy with fresh garlic.

Parents took the knowledge home to start their own gardens. One family grew a corn crop that far surpassed the one at the family garden.

“We're serving some of the more vulnerable children and families in the county through the school,” Hang said. “A long-term goal for this project is to duplicate the same program at other ECEAP preschool sites throughout the county.”

Ken Stark, human services director for Snohomish County, recently toured four of the county's new community gardens.

He sees gardening as the path to quality family time.

“It is truly a prevention program,” Stark said. “It's a program that helps prevent people from isolating themselves and dealing with depression or maybe getting involved with activities that maybe aren't so healthy.”

The Growing Groceries program, which is putting on another vegetable gardening conference for the public Saturday in Marysville, has also shown people that gardening needn't be reserved for those with land, money or experience.

Fulford, who works as an administrative assistant in Seattle, relied on the Mukilteo Community Garden for most of her materials, tools, water and expertise. She used a friend's leftover seeds.

Without that, she and Lilly would not have, for the first time, a freezer full of vibrantly green, homegrown string beans for fall and winter eating.

Next spring, the Mukilteo garden organizers hope to plant communal crops that would be too large for individual plots — such as sweet corn, raspberries and pumpkins.

The Fulfords, already growing fall crops such as cauliflower, can't wait for the garden to more than quadruple in size with 50 more raised beds in the spring.

“It's going to be huge. Isn't it exciting?” Fulford said. “This thing could turn into my grocery store for produce.”

Sarah Jackson: 425-339-3037, sjackson@heraldnet.com.