On a warm October day, volunteers gathered at the New Holly P-Patch, a community garden in South Seattle’s Othello neighborhood, for one of the year’s final harvests. Over the past few weeks, calendula flowers, marigolds and ground cherries — a fruit akin to a small, sweet tomatillo — had filled the garden beds, ready to be picked. In the southeast corner, corn stalks, planted earlier in the summer, towered 15 feet high.
A block east, cars whooshed down a busy neighborhood thoroughfare. But near the garden, single-family houses lined the edges of a peaceful, tree-lined street. Just to the south, children rode their bikes on the sidewalks and ran in a grassy field.
New Holly is an affordable housing development whose residents are primarily East African and Southeast Asian immigrants. The New Holly P-Patch was established as a community garden by the city of Seattle in 2002, but until last year, many of its beds had been neglected for years. Thanks to the efforts of volunteers organized by Black Star Farmers, a Seattle-based coalition that encourages the city’s communities of color to grow their own food, nearly all the beds in the P-Patch were now producing vegetables, herbs or native flowers. In some, people from the surrounding community had started growing soybeans, garlic, brassica and squash. The coalition hopes that eventually, neighborhood residents will take care of all the beds.
Black Star Farmers have also engaged in “guerilla gardening” — gardening on unclaimed land, or on land legally claimed by others. Coalition members see their gardening work as political by nature. “Political resistance is the key to your own nourishment and survival,” said one member, who asked to be identified only as MD. “When you take the skills to grow your own food into your own hands, you become a more resilient human.”
At New Holly, Black Star Farmers members have planted squash, beans and corn together in a traditional farming technique known as milpa, or the three sisters, in which each plant variety benefits the other two by, for example, increasing soil nitrogen or helping to ward off pests. It’s an ancient system with roots in Central America and Mexico, where it is still commonly practiced. Milpa involves human relationships, too, emphasizing cooperation and community; according to MD, the three sisters serve as “guides for us about how we can organize our social systems.”
“When you take the skills to grow your own food into your own hands, you become a more resilient human.”
Sombra, another coalition member, said their parents were farmers in Bolivia before emigrating to the United States. The maturing ears of corn, with their silky tufts of fiber, remind Sombra of babies in slings, evoking the way their ancestors carried children into the fields. Sombra hopes the people gardening at New Holly will make similar connections to their heritage while building new connections with each other. “Tending plants really makes life better,” they said.
THE BLACK STAR FARMERS established their first garden in the summer of 2020, during the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd. The garden, located in a public park in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, sprang from the desire of protesters and other activists, both housed and unhoused, to learn to grow their own produce, MD said. Participants grew fruit, vegetables, and medicinal plants and herbs, and distributed them all for free.
The garden became one of the most enduring and visible reminders of that eventful summer. For months after the protests ended, the Black Star Farmers gathered there to provide mutual aid, distributing food, naloxone, and other supplies and resources. In addition to teaching people how to garden, the coalition also hosted political lessons and discussions. Volunteers learned about the history of Seattle’s Black and Indigenous communities and talked about ways to divest from harmful systems, including the carceral system.
In October 2023, the city of Seattle informed the group that it would soon demolish the garden, citing problems with camping and public drug use in the area. The Black Star Farmers organized sit-in protests, which deterred the city for three months. Finally, at 6 a.m. on Dec. 27, employees of the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation destroyed the garden and removed the tents.
Meanwhile, the Black Star Farmers have established and tended gardens in other underused spaces, including at the University of Washington Arboretum, the Che Fico Greenhouse in Mount Baker and New Holly, which became their new hub for food distribution and community events.
On one sunny Sunday in August, just after noon, people came to New Holly for one such event. Under a pop-up tent, Chef Carmen of the Black Star Food Collective displayed foil trays filled with an abundance of locally grown food, much of it from the P-Patch. Roughly two dozen volunteers chatted as they served themselves, loading up on sun-yellow corn on the cob, roasted summer squash, wild rice, red beets, carrots and salads bursting with cherry tomatoes. A table held materials for writing letters to imprisoned Palestinians. Parents brought their children, who ran around the garden, playing.
“Political resistance is the key to your own nourishment and survival.”
Around 1:30 p.m., participants gathered under a wooden pavilion for a discussion of the milpa farming technique. When the conversation died down, volunteers got to work weeding, watering and deadheading the calendulas.
Last year, the Black Star Farmers received a grant from the King Conservation District, a local public agency, to purchase a lot in Columbia City, a neighborhood just north of New Holly. There, the group hopes to establish a long-term home with a greenhouse where members can grow seedlings for New Holly and other gardens, along with an indoor space where coalition members can cook, eat and teach together. Reflecting on the coalition’s past and future work, Sombra recalled Brazilian union leader and forest defender Chico Mendes, who famously said that “ecology without class struggle is just gardening.” “I think we do a bit more than gardening,” said Sombra.
