Tours & Events

All tours will be conducted on Saturday, August 10, 12:30-5:30 pm. Contact each site location ahead of time since some sites have limited space availability.

Check out these great tours to garden sites in the greater Seattle area for the 2013 ACGA conference:

For more information, please contact:

Art, Design and Culture in the Edible City

Imagine a city designed around ecological systems and edible landscapes where arts and culture play a key role in the designing innovative urban spaces, reimagining our food lifestyles, and connecting with neighbors.

Visit 4 community gardens that each demonstrate sustainability, creative repurposing, and vibrant community culture:

  • UpGarden P-Patch (300 Mercer St.)
    Have lunch on the grass at this first large-scale public community garden in the U.S.that shows adaptive reuse of an old parking garage and vehicles.
  • Belltown P-Patch (Elliott Ave. & Vine St.)
    Belltown offers an artistic vision for greener streets and stormwater with its legacy of public art contributions, a former arts residency, and the Vine Street Steps.
  • Bradner Gardens Park and P-Patch (1750 S Bradner Pl. & 29th Ave. S)
    Check out the windmill and cistern, an array of public art, and a focus on community and self-expression.
  • Oxbow Park and P-Patch (6400 Corson Ave.)
    At this home of the iconic Hat n’Boots, we’ll talk about Seattle’s river, the rise of a neighborhood arts scene and historic preservation.
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P-Patch & Greenway Bike Tour: How Seattle Rolls

From a quiet oasis named for an herb and slipped between two residences to a raucous community party with art and live music, experience the edible garden variety of northwest Seattle by bicycle. The route will include a portion of the Burke Gilman Trail, our granddaddy rail-trail, as well as bike lanes and new “neighborhood greenway” streets being redesigned for bicycle and pedestrian priority.

Cyclists will visit whimsically named Whirled Peas and Thyme Patch gardens, then pedal a modest grade to the festive Art in the Garden party at the Ballard P-Patch, which includes live music, artists exhibiting and making art for sale, and much more.

Lunch will be provided at the festival. Also included are visits to a P-Patch on a challenging urban site, one developed with a neighborhood “pocket park,” and one with a Hobbit-like cob tool shed.

  • Distance: approximately 20 miles
  • Difficulty: moderate to easy
  • Group limit: 20
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Building Community in South Seattle

Community building is a continuous process. A community garden begins with an idea and progresses through stages of planning, development and construction and does not end when the garden is established. Community gardens and P-Patches provide opportunities for neighbors and community members to collaborate toward a common goal thus strengthening the sense of community and pride.

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Historic Farm and Innovative Spaces: P-Patch Tour

Gilman Gardens, one of the many sites visited on the Building Community North/Central Seattle tour.

Community gardens take on the personality of the neighborhood, gardeners, and the community that adopts it. This tour will show you a range of these personalities in north and central Seattle neigbhorhoods.

Along this tour you will see how these gardens bring the community together and see the impact it has on the neighborhood. Due to the size limitations of some of the gardens.

This tour can only take up to 30 people.

  • Picardo Garden was the first donated land for the Seattle P-patch system (the “P” in P-patch) and claims to have the best soil in Seattle.
  • Interbay, one of the largest P-Patch gardens, Interbay is home to a community kitchen, beehives, lavender field, memorial fountain, flag pole, large giving gardens and even a time capsule.
  • Eastlake has a view to die for, right on Lake Union there is a boat launch across the street. Many wonderful handmade elements abound in this newly expanded garden.
  • Gilman Garden took shape out of the hard work of plucky volunteers who approached Seattle Department of Transportation to turn a weedy, blackberry bramble-infested road median into a productive community garden.
  • Danny Woo Garden meets the needs of low income and senior residents with the welcome green space in the International District.
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Learning Gardens

Seattleites grow food and community at our Community Learning Gardens. Tour 5 of the city’s most beloved sites and learn about the various community engagement models employed at each.

On this citywide tour, you’ll see the whole city while exploring unusual garden spaces that reflect the uniqueness and diversity of the communities that built them.

The tour begins in north Seattle with a Children’s Garden that evolved from an abandoned swimming pool basin more than twenty years ago and ends with a visit to a burgeoning urban farm and wetlands site getting its roots in southeast Seattle.

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Community Orchards of Seattle: Traditional and Modern

Join us for a whirlwind tour of community orchards within Seattle's urban landscape. We will be visiting sites large and small, looking at both traditional and innovative tree cultivation techniques.

Can you have an orchard with 46 trees in 750 square feet? Yes! Can you have a large food forest on public property? Yes! Can you bring a neighborhood together by planting fruiting trees? Yes! Come with us to see this, and much much MORE.

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Sharing the Harvest: Healthy Food Access & Justice

Food is the web of life, connecting us to the land, our neighbors, our communities, our cultural heritage, and our history. It is a complex, intertwined web of growers, distributors, and consumers.

However, despite fulfilling a basic human need, food can also disconnect us from this rich web. Certain communities disproportionately struggle to access good food, the cornerstone of health. For example, where you live in the city, your income, ethnicity, ability, religion and gender all determine what food you can access. Food is often grown in a way that does not respect the land, the environment, and the individuals and their families who grew it, produced it, and distributed it.

Join us as we explore gardens sitting atop hills, farms nestled between freeways, and neighborhood community kitchens, and meet the people working to increase food accessibility and fight for food justice in Seattle. Learn how passionate gardeners, cooks, and eaters of all ages and backgrounds are mobilizing to undo disparities in the food system and bring our web of life back into balance.

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Therapeutic Gardens

This tour focuses on gardens that offer therapeutic benefits to a wide range of populations. This tour will be of interest for anyone interested in therapeutic gardens and viewing a range of projects.

The sites we will visit include gardens for children with a range of disabilities (Fircrest State School/Seattle Playgarden), families of veterans being treated at the VA (Seattle Fisher House) and Japanese/American senior residents (Nikkei Manor).

Facility personnel will meet us on site. The tour leader worked on many of the projects and will explain the process, goals and reflections. A box lunch will be included in this tour and most are ADA accessible.

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Urban Agriculture

Seattle has a vibrant urban agriculture community that includes continued cultivation of land that once embodied the livelihood of local farmers. Join us to take a look at the old lands still under cultivation in new ways, some of the innovative market gardens that have sprung up across the city and their venues for selling their produce and a peek at a learning garden that specializes in empowering people to grow their own!

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Walking Scavenger Hunt

This interactive tour will lead participants on a journey through Seattle's urban community gardens to the iconic Pike Place Market.

We will provide clues for a scavenger hunt that will help you to learn more about amazing community gardening connections to the larger social and physical landscape.

This tour will be conducted on foot and public transportation, so please keep that in mind when signing up.

Tour limited to 20 people.

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Sowing Seeds in Seattle: Youth and Children's Garden

From whimsical gardens for young children to composting programs for teens, Seattle has a wide array of opportunities for young people to get hands-on experience gardening.

We’ll begin and end with great garden play spaces: Magnuson Park’s Childrens’ Garden, designed around a giant blue whale bed, and the Seattle Children’s Play Garden, where children of special needs can play and garden alongside their typically developing friends.

In between we’ll stop at Sand Point Elementary School whose garden demonstrates what can be accomplished in an urban setting where only blacktop is available to build on; Green Plate Special, a food-growing and cooking program for underserved middle school students; the Bed of Life at the Garfield Community Center, where produce is grown as part of the Seattle Teen Employment Preparation Program; and Ground Up Organics, at Yesler Terrace, where teens learn about and make compost, as well as cultivate and harvest vegetables, herbs, and flowers that are grown in the greenhouse and open raised beds. We’ll have a box lunch along the way.

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