Farmer Scott's Five Easy Steps for Planting

Luscious spinach, ready for harvest

How many spring crops can you name? Chances are, we planted it at the Seattle Community Farm this spring. In March and April our volunteers planted peas, lettuce, mustard greens, turnips, chard, collards, kale, beets, carrots, green onions, and more!

We've already seen the results of their labor, harvesting bins of spinach and other salad greens for the Rainier Valley Food Bank.

Now that the spring crops are in the ground, we've started the next round of planting - yummy summer crops such as tomatoes, cucumbers, and beans.

Since creating healthy soil is an integral part of growing food, we spend a lot of time in the dirt. Here’s how we prepare a bed for planting while building the soil:

1. We top off the compost with organic fertilizer and mix it all into the soil. If the bed still has cover crop leftover from the winter, we turn the soil, burying the cover crop. The buried cover crop then decomposes for a couple weeks, putting nutrients back into the soil. (If we’re in a hurry to plant the bed, we’ll just pull out the cover crop rather than wait for it to decompose.)


2. Next we add compost to improve the soil structure and add nutrients for the plants.


3. We then smooth everything out and use a hoe to make rows.


4. After planting, we frequently cover the bed with a row cover. This fine-mesh fabric keeps the birds out, raises the soil temperature, and retains moisture in the soil.


5. Then we keep the seeds moist while waiting them to pop their leaves out of the soil.

Spring radishes

Volunteer Profile: From Fruit Trees to Movie Night

Whether you find Cassandra working at sea on a fish observation trip, climbing ladders to pick the sweetest pear, or organizing Lettuce Link’s Marra Farm Movie Night, she is sure to have you giggling and learning something new.

Cassandra Donovan has volunteered with Lettuce Link since she moved to Seattle in 2005. As a new resident looking for ways to connect to the community, she saw a flier seeking volunteers for the Community Fruit Tree Harvest and signed up. Each year since then, from July to October, she volunteers as a harvest leader— twisting and picking fruit from the trees. The fruit harvest supports community needs by “using something that would otherwise be wasted to feed and help people. Not to mention, it is fun!” Cassandra explains.

"Volunteering for Lettuce Link helps people, provides food, and fun!

“Volunteering makes you step outside yourself and you receive the benefit of helping people, learning new things, gaining extra work experience, making direct impact, and eating free food.”

Before she started volunteering with Lettuce Link, Cassandra had no experience picking fruit, farming or harvesting food. Now she continues to learn about food – both its cultivation and disparities in food access.

In 2011, working with the Friends of Lettuce Link group, Cassandra spearheaded the Marra Farm Movie Night fundraiser. She had been taking classes in project management and wanted to get some additional experience, and Marra Farm Movie Night proved to be the perfect project. Thanks to her leadership, the event brought close to 100 guests to the farm and netted $1,000! She proved to have hidden talent as an emcee and even created a how-to guide for next year’s movie night planning team. It is because of volunteers like Cassandra that Lettuce Link is able to truly "foster community connections through gardening education, sustainable food production, and raising awareness about good nutrition and food justice.”

Thank you Cassandra and all our Lettuce Link Volunteers for making the harvest so bountiful!

Thanks to our intern, Blair, for this profile of Cassandra. Blair will graduate from Seattle Pacific University next month and then head north to work at the Wrangell Mountains Center in Alaska. We wish her the best! 

Melissa Harris-Perry on Food Justice

Solid Ground's 12^th Annual Building Community Luncheon is this Friday, May 11^th at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center. 

We will be welcoming Melissa Harris-Perry as the keynote speaker, who is a professor of political science at Tulane University, where she is founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race and Politics in the South. Her academic research is inspired by a desire to investigate the challenges facing contemporary black Americans and to better understand the multiple, creative ways that African Americans respond to these challenges. She is also an award winning author and appears regularly on MSNBC and other media venues.

Last month, Melissa Harris-Perry did a segment on food deserts and food justice:

Intrigued? Come join us  this Friday for an inspiring luncheon to benefit Solid Ground's community building in King County. 

First Harvest at Marra Farm!

Last Friday we gathered chard, chives, asparagus, oregano, and cilantro for Providence Regina House food bank and the South Park Community Kitchen. We are now (im)patiently tending the rest of the garden until the vegetables are ready for harvest.



Want to learn about organic gardening, enjoy the company of other volunteers, and improve food security in Seattle? Volunteer at the Marra Farm Giving Garden this season! Contact us at lettucelink@solid-ground.org for more information.

Thanks to Lettuce Link volunteer Steve Tracy for taking these beautiful photos -- find the entire set here

Seattle Tilth Edible Plant Sale - Plant an Extra Row in Your Garden!

What are you doing this weekend? On Saturday and Sunday, we hope to see you at Seattle Tilth's Edible Plant Sale! 

We'll be at the sale encouraging folks to consider buying some extra starts and growing a row (pdf) for the food bank this season. Everyone deserves fresh produce.  No amount of home-grown delicious produce is too small, and it always goes to an appreciative home.      

Here are some tips for growing extra produce:

• Plant an extra row or more. The more you plant to give away, the more you can help.
• Plant just one or two extra crops. This will result in a larger harvest of fewer items, which is better for the food banks.
• Food banks love most fruits and veggies! Some good examples of easy things to grow are: Beets, carrots, collard greens, green onions, herbs (dill, basil, cilantro, etc.) beans, peas, cucumbers, squash, pak choi, chard, radishes and lettuce.
• Harvest, wash and deliver to a local food bank or hot meals program in your neighborhood (pdf).
• Keep track of your produce donations; send totals to Lettuce Link at the end of the season. Last year, over 20,000 pounds of produce was donated from P-Patches and backyard gardens.

Share the bounty of your harvest!  Seattle Tilth's May Edible Plant Sale runs from 9am-3pm on Saturday May 5^th and Sunday May 6^th.   Located at Meridian Park in Wallingford behind the Good Shepherd Center, 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N.   

The sale features over 350 plant varieties and 50,000 plants. Unlike many plants sold at local stores and nurseries, these varieties are well adapted to thrive in our Pacific Northwest climate and are locally and organically or sustainably grown.