The Evergreen State College Community Gardens, located on our Organic Farm, are an opportunity for all students, faculty, and members of our greater community to be able to get their hands in the earth and practice sustainable agriculture. You don’t have to be in an agricultural program, you don’t have to have any prior gardening experience, you don’t even have to be a student! The Gardens are yours, for as long as you want them.

Our mission is to spread organic gardening practices to people who otherwise would not get the opportunity to learn to love it: students just out of the city or the suburbs, people who live in apartments or town homes that don’t allow space for a garden, women and men who are intrigued by the idea of growing their own food, but intimidated about trying it on their own. We will provide the tools and the seeds for your success, both literally and metaphorically.

We will have workshops on sustainable growing and harvesting techniques throughout the year for interested Gardeners. The biggest of these is HarvestFest, our annual sustainable agriculture fest that we hold in early October. There, we host a ton of events, from biodynamic gardening workshops to root beer brewing and mushroom identification. Keep your eyes out for posters come fall!

We also have a growing seedbank. TESC Community Gardens strives t provide locally adapted, heirloom varieties of whatever we can imagine you guys wanting to grow. If you want a variety that we don’t have, ask us, and we will provide it for you if we at all can.

Along with our guidance and access to compost, the toolshed and our seedbank, we will provide you with a twelve-by-twelve plot. What you do with that is limited only by your imagination (and the laws of Washington State). You want to raise guinea pigs in a hutch on your plot? Turn your piece of Farm into a pitcher plant bog? Throw up a hoop house and grow Amazonian medicinal herbs? Ranch silk worms? Sprout a chunk of Midwestern prairie in Cascadian soil? Plant an edible forest? Make a tea mandala? Sow edible fungi? Anything you can fit into your patch of earth, you can do, so long as it doesn’t keep your neighbors from realizing their dreams with their dirt, or prevent future generations of organic gardeners from being able to use your land when you’re done with it.

If your vision of your space goes beyond a twelve by twelve  foot square (or you’re working for an organization that wants to feed more people than 144 square feet of gardenspace can provide for), you can do what a lot of people have done and join forces with several other Commie Gardeners to make a more substantial claim to land.

Actually, we recommend sharing your plot with like-minded folks, especially for new gardeners. This gives another pair of eyes to watch over your garden, and another pair of arms to haul water out to your plot on dry summer days. Decades of experience has shown that the more people you have tending your land, the healthier it will be. Why do you think farmers always have such big families?

If you have any questions, about the Community Gardens, sustainable gardening techniques, plant varieties, seedsaving, or getting a plot, please feel free to contact us at TESCCommunityGardens@gmail.com.

Gardens for the People!

~colin