Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow Read Online Free PDF

to plant a garden. Like my mother, she thought it important that kids know where their food came from. She also wanted to grow vegetables for Neighbors in Need, a precursor to the local food banks. Jobs and paychecks in Seattle were vanishing overnight; people were hungry.
    In the months that followed, Del Boca convinced the Picardo family, owners of a truck farm in northeast Seattle, to let her use one of their fields. The city agreed to pay taxes on the property, and the teachers and students at a nearby school volunteered to tend the land. Families who helped were given small plots for themselves around the perimeter. It was the beginning of what would become the city’s community gardening program.
    I had heard about these gardens even before I moved to Seattle. They were called P-Patches in homage to the Picardo family. While I was still living in San Francisco, I’d read newspaper articles about how so many people in Seattle wanted to garden that there were waiting lists for community garden plots. It seemed hard to believe at the time.
    By my second spring in Seattle, still living there only part-time, I considered myself one of those people. I had reached capacity with my tiny side garden and had begun casting my eyes at the embankment below the deck. It got only morning sun, but buttercups grew there, thick and lush. If there was enough sun for weeds, surely there was enough for vegetables.
    Emboldened by my success the summer before, I carved out a strip of earth from the hillside using a pitchfork and shovel. The soil was rich and dark, and I got giddy with the possibilities. I would plant broccoli! Cauliflower! Kale! Leeks! All things are possible at the beginning of a gardening season.
    At the nursery the next day, I bought the season’s first vegetable starts. The leeks were threadlike, fetal versions of the vegetables they would grow to become. The kale and cauliflower were sturdier, textured leaves spouting upward. I nestled theminto the dark soil, planting their plastic tags beside them, though clearly the leaves of the cauliflower looked nothing like those of the kale.
    Then I went out of town. It was March but I wasn’t worried—the vegetables would be watered by the rain. I couldn’t wait to see how much bigger they would be when I returned. All things are possible at the beginning of a gardening season.
    I came home from my two-week trip late at night, but by first light I was outside, still in pajamas, scrambling down the steep and muddy slope to check my vegetables at the bottom. How big had they grown?
    Vegetables?
What vegetables?
I couldn’t find them.
    I searched along the strip of soil I had cleared but saw nothing. The plastic tags were still there, but the sprouting starts had vanished. All that was left were a few nubbins of stem. Any tender leaves had been nibbled into oblivion.
    This is how I learned that buttercup makes excellent slug habitat—and that slugs have a taste for kale. I couldn’t believe the destruction. The hillside belonged to the slimy creatures. I had to come up with another solution.
    The back deck that overlooked the buttercup hill also overlooked a house down below. I didn’t know those neighbors, but in winter when the trees lost their leaves, I could see into their yard. There was a deck, a path, and four raised garden beds just sitting there.
Four raised garden beds
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    It was more space than I had ever dreamed of, and I itched to plant them with peas and radishes and tender lettuces. The things I could grow with four whole garden beds! The Commandments warn us not to covet our neighbors’ wives; they make no mention of their raised garden beds.
    Would it be weird to ask if they were going to use them?
    Maybe they had installed them in a fit of ambition but had later grown tired of gardening. Maybe the beds had been there when they bought the house and had never been used. Desperationmakes us concoct all sorts of crazy schemes—and this was my first taste of