The zucchini, yellow squash, and cucumbers are ready to be planted out this week.  Somehow, mid-May has snuck up on us already!

Squash planting, occurring as it does only once during the season, is a transitional moment to be savored.  The planting out of warm-weather, single-planting crops like zucchini, beans (went in last week) and tomatoes (end of the month), means that spring is somehow already transitioning into summer and our Seattle heat wave should be starting to ramp up.

In the rush of spring seeding we’ve already gotten several successions of greens in the ground (arugula, braising mix, lettuce mix, spinach, bok choi, kale, broccoli…) and there will be more fall successions of those to come. But zucchini only gets planted once, and it’s going in tomorrow!  The days have gotten long enough and sunny enough, and the nights have lost that spring chill for the most part.

We never know, of course, what the rest of the season’s weather will bring.  But the plants have sized up nicely and they are ready for real soil to spread their roots out into.  We hope that these little starts will soon grow into bulky, vining plants, then provide us with orange blossoms and green and yellow fruits.  As surely as tomatoes and peppers, these succulent squash are indicators of summer eating and can be savored in countless delicious ways.

These thoughts of things to come will be in our minds tomorrow as we plant out these summer squashes at our south Ballard plot and the cucumbers at our North Beach space.    And as for the other indicator that the veggie season is upon us:  Farmers’ market begins in 2 weeks on Weds May 29!!   Farmstand begins Saturday, June 1!  We are so looking forward to another locally grown season.

Peas and lovage,

City Grown

We spent the winter planning what to grow and how to improve the farm to bring even more delicious veggies to the table this year.  Now that it’s spring it’s time to turn those plans  into action!

We are getting back out into the plots, prepping and planting.  We had a couple of great work parties with some fantastic volunteer help spreading compost and getting the plots ready for planting.  Now the peas are in the ground with a fancy new trellis system, and the first greenhouse seedlings are on their way out to real soil.

We are looking forward to the days getting longer and the beginning of harvest and market time, time to reconnect with all our wonderful supportive neighbors and friends, CSA members and farmers’ market shoppers.

Happy Spring and see you soon!

Becky, Noe & Scott

We, at your neighborhood urban farm, are seeking new spaces to grow food! We grow vegetables for sale at several plots around our neighborhood, and we are looking for new underutilized spaces to expand our farm this spring.  This land may be an unusually large backyard, space at a church, school, community center, or any other piece of land that is in a sunny and accessible location.  

By sharing your land with us, you will enjoy the benefits of partnering with us.  Our land partners get a share of the fresh vegetables we produce during the growing season.  Our partnership allows you to watch the garden grow without any obligation at maintaining this garden area.  We have developed a good relationship with our existing Land Partners and look forward to making more of these connections as they are vital to our success in creating and sustaining our neighborhood farm.

Please contact citygrownsea@gmail.com if you have a land lead for us!

Check out our website for more information about what we do: http://www.citygrownseattle.com

Thank you for supporting your neighborhood farm!
–  Becky, Noe and Scott

Plot Requirements

• Proximity to one of our existing hubs
  • Wallingford at 40th St. and Eastern Ave
  • Ballard at 60th St. and 17th Ave
  • Tangletown
  • Crown Hill at 14th Ave and Holman Rd
• Large size (2000 square feet or larger)
• Good sun exposure
• Access to water

We updated our Flickr photo set to include some highlight pictures from the entire season! Go check em out!

Suddenly it’s beginning to feel like fall… where did the time go?   Here’s a quick couple of summer snapshots before this season slips away.

With love,

City Grown

A week’s worth of City Grown produce picked out by one of our fabulous CSA members in mid-August

This much zucchini three times a week!

Scott works Wallingford on a warm Wednesday

Sunflowers beginning to bloom at our Crown Hill plot

This ain’t no grocery store garlic, folks!  These lovely bulbs came out of the ground at one of our Tangletown plots today.   You really have to plan ahead to grow garlic; we planted this crop way back in October 2011.   We got our seed garlic from Betsey Wittick of Laughing Crow Farm on Bainbridge Island.  We are growing 5 different varieties, each with differing spiciness, storability, and best usages.   The first variety ready for harvest is called “French Pink,” and it has a sultry reddish undertone with big cloves.    These beauties will need a couple of weeks to cure and then we will start to make them available for sale at our market and farmstand.

We are excited to add these unique, heirloom varieties of garlic to our regular lineup of delicious veggies for sale.   This week the summer crops are starting to add themselves to the spring mix.  This Saturday at the farmstand we will have:

Zucchini! (new this week), red summer crisp lettuce, broccolini, romanesco cauliflower, baby beets, orange & purple carrots, bunching onions, baby salad greens, collards, rainbow chard, garlic scapes, french breakfast radishes, dino kale, red russian kale, purple top turnips, & mustard greens!

The Washington Young Farmers’ Coalition threw us a Crop Mob today.  We spent the day with a bunch of fantastic volunteers and completed the task of rescuing the pole beans from encroaching grass and giving them a tall trellis to climb up.  It was a fun time and a big accomplishment.   Now grow, little beans, grow!

Above: volunteers helped us haul out debris from this overgrown backyard.  Below: Noe pulling ivy & blackberries

Three months later, this backyard is growing City Grown’s first and second succession of salad mix:

Above: spinach, radishes, arugula, lettuce mix, and spicy mix a couple weeks after germinating.  More seed babies just planted under the row cover.  Below: Noe harvesting salad to be bagged up for our first farmstand.

It feels so good to see our vision starting to come to life!

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As we start gearing up for harvesting and selling these crops, we want to take a moment and say, we are so thankful for our CSA members!  These fine folks took a leap of faith with us by giving us their money in the early spring!  We would not have been able to get the farm off the ground without this financial boost.  We are excited to finally starting to be able to fulfill our promise of delicous, ultra-local veggies for our CSA members’ tables.

Here’s a CSA member profile.  Paul B. has been an amazing friend to the farm – not only did he contribute his membership money, he came out and volunteered this winter and helped us prepare the ground for planting.  Here’s Paul on the rototiller back in early March:

Paul showed up at our work parties on his bike with saddlebags full of vegetables from his own garden and his homebrew cider that he shared with us.  What a guy!  Stop giving us so much, Paul — we’re supposed to be providing *you* with something!  Finally, this past weekend we were able to begin to fulfill our promise of a vegetable return on Paul’s investment.  Here’s Paul at our first farmstand.  We had a CSA-members-only preview day before opening up the farmstand to the public.

Starting June 2, our farmstand will be open at 4108 Eastern Ave, every Saturday from 10 to 2.  We will also be at the Wallingford farmers’ market on Wednesdays from3:30 to 7pm.  Join Paul and stop on by!

Remember the winter hours spent manhandling a rototiller over hard ground newly denuded of sod?  All that time spent lugging buckets of compost up and down stairs?  It’s starting to pay off.   The first hardy soldiers of a new season’s worth of vegetables are springing to life out in the plots.   Seeing green shoots emerge from that soil and recognizing them as radishes, carrots, spinach, arugula — this is what it’s all about.

The first stalwart transplants are also making their way out of the greenhouse and into the beds we prepped at Crown Hill Center.  The seeds we planted 4 weeks ago became graceful seedlings, with a single pair of leaves, ready for real soil and real rain and to begin really photosynthesizing and magically becoming the productive broccoli, kale, collards, chard, and parsley plants that we imagined they’d be when we planted them.

In August, when we are busier than busy with harvests and sales and feasting, we might forget that each of these plants has a history.  Each required care and nurturing to get it from seed to seedling to food-producer.  But right now, in mid-April, the wonderment of a sprouting seed is front and center.

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