Meadowbrook Community Gardens and Orchards is a project begun by volunteers in the Meadowbrook neighborhood in the summer of 2010. We grow perennial and annual fruits and vegetables, herbs, a pollinator garden, and maintain an orchard, all in Seattle’s Meadowbrook Park in an area just south of Nathan Hale High School.

The project is a communal effort; we do not have individual plots. We value growing food locally and organically to provide our community with healthy food options, learn and teach sustainable food production, and build community. We distribute what we grow to our participating volunteers and the needy in our community by donating the majority of what we grow to the Lake City Food Bank (North Helpline).

Our normal meeting time for planting, cultivating, weeding and harvesting is Sunday afternoons. We usually follow each Sunday work party with a potluck, which we highly value for the community it builds. Our meeting time changes slightly with the seasons and weather. And often work takes place outside of our Sunday work parties. For instance, volunteers are responsible for our watering system almost every day of the week during the growing season. We also have planning meetings, pot washing, transplanting, materials procurement, food bank runs, and many other tasks which occur outside of our work parties.