The organic garden ministry has been in place since 2007 and has transformed the church and community in several ways. It needs a reboot, and could use new volunteers to help bring it back to its former glory now that we are almost post-pandemic!
1) 100% of the church yard waste (aside from weeds gone to seed) is composted on site and used in our gardening activities to produce food.
2) About 15% of the food waste produced is harvested on site and used in gardening activities.
3) Fresh produce from the garden is used in the food ministry of the church. Most is used in our monthly Jubilee dinners — a free meal for anyone in the community who wishes to join us once per month — and the rest is used in other events and given to volunteers, some of whom are church members and some are not. It has transformed the Jubilee dinners by improving the quality of the meal we serve. We now plan meals with Jubilee cooks and provide produce to their request. When necessary we will harvest, process and preserve (usually freeze) produce from the garden to be used at Jubilee dinners at a later date. Since it is organic and very fresh, the quality and taste are better than we could get from buying, plus there is virtually no carbon footprint.
The garden has also served as a model for other houses of worship. Groups like Earth Ministry and Seattle Tilth’s Food and Faith Initiative and the Bishop’s Committee for the Environment like to have their meetings and activities here so they can get ideas for members. The St. Andrew’s garden has also received grants, most recently $1000 from Seattle Tilth for materials to construct a large gravity fed composting system that will further demonstrate optimal use of limited campus space and use of local resources.
In the past, we have teamed up with iLEAP (located in Wallingford section of Seattle) to offer hands on experience in urban agriculture for a number of their groups.
> Read an August 11, 2016 article about our organic garden and feeding ministries titled “A growing vision in Seattle’s Green Lake neighborhood” here.
> Watch a video about our organic garden:
Drip irrigation system
In 2016, St. Andrew’s was awarded a $500 Green Grant from the Bishop’s Committee for the Environment to offset most of the costs of its drip irrigation system. Read about our new drip irrigation system here.
Volunteer
Garden work parties take place most Friday afternoons. Contact Rowena Curtis (rowenaruthnargy254@gmail.com) to volunteer in the garden.