In the News

Last Saturday evening, community members gathered at the Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands for Iftar, a meal eaten by Muslims after sunset during Ramadan. The event was organized through a partnership between Wasat, Masakan, and Tilth Alliance.

The pandemic’s gardening boom kept nurseries busy. Seed companies were caught off guard and ran out of seeds. And non-profits like Tilth Alliance, got swamped with phone calls or emails. Many of the questions were about soil. Turns out, people built raised beds, but often filled them with compost.

You’ve decided: This is your year. Your year to harvest armfuls of homegrown produce or flowers from your yard. To make salsa in summer, potato leek soup in fall and collard greens for New Year’s Day.

Using food assistance to grow gardens could prove useful if more people — and retailers — knew about it.

A great place to start your garden education is with Tilth Alliance, a local nonprofit that focuses on issues surrounding growing organic food, such as sustainability, education, and justice.

When the soil is too cool for planting just about anything, there are still things that you can do to get ready for the upcoming growing season.

Tilth Alliance is partnering with The Giving Grove, an organization whose mission is to strengthen the health and wellness of communities by facilitating a nationwide network of small sustainable orchards.

You can’t beat homegrown edible plants for high-impact flavor and nutrition. The longer they go from soil to fork, the weaker their content — from flavor-enhancing sugars to immune-system-boosting antioxidants.

When the Tilth Alliance gathers next week, they’ll discuss how farmers are facing “existential challenges.”

Typically, June is still a misty month in Seattle, which helps plants survive the region’s typical dry season from July through September. But those Junes haven’t been happening for the past several years, and this year has shown that our dry season can get very dry.