Urban Aqriculture Explodes in Seattle

It seems like almost overnight urban agriculture has bloomed in Seattle. According to Seattlepi.com, residents in Seattle have a few love, and are utilizing every patch of land to begin urban garden plots. Local churches and community centers have even torn up their traditional landscaping to make room from garden plots. The Seattle Central Community College is even offering the city's first, and quite possibly the country's first, program focused on sustainable urban agriculture. The classes are already filling up. What is it exactly that has caused this boom in urban agriculture? Seattle is known far and wide for being a city very much concerned with the environment so is it really any surprise that residents are now desiring more fresh, local and seasonal foods? One of the biggest challenges so far is finding spaces for these gardens (a problem we are more than familiar with here in Charleston). The solution came with one woman's idea to create a website that matches farmers with available plots around the city. There are currently 400 listings on the site. (Maybe this is an idea that Charleston could use if the interest picks up enough in the years to come?) Urban gardens are springing up in the most unusual of places, such as the front lawns of churches, but the idea is catching on and one by one people are lining up to get a plot of their own.

I feel like this is kind of what is happening here in Charleston. A year or two ago the idea of urban gardening was a foreign one to me and there were few, if any, urban gardens around town. It seems like in these past two springs, this one especially with the birth of the Bogarden, have marked a turn in the popularity of Charleston's urban agriculture scene. Who knows what next year will hold. With the growing interest and public awareness of the various urban gardening projects around town who knows how many gardens we will see pop up next spring.