[email protected] community agriculture coordinator€¦ · powerpoint presentation author:...
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[email protected] Agriculture Coordinator
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Seattle is the county seat The median home price is over $632,000 3rd largest homeless population in US Growth Rate of about 2.5% annually (525,000) We are urban and densely urban within the growth management boundaries
Create an Urban Soils Map
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Our Farm Planning Service Team regularly uses the Web Soil Survey map and we figured having the same information available to our urban constituents would be equally valuable? BUT WOULD IT?
Create an Urban Soils Map
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We quickly realized that when you are looking at the urban landscape, most soil is fill. Developers take any existing topsoil offsite and bring in fill. Knowing that your urban lot has lost the top lay of Alderwood or Buckley soil would not be of particular value to urban growers.
Intent:• Compile a List of
Community Gardens
• Provide Soil Fertility Case Studies
• Showcase Opportunities to Get Involved
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So we went back to the drawing board…..and we went back at a time when we were grappling with the question of how to best serve the urban communities. Should we simply port our successful Rural farm planning services model into the urban landscape? Backyard farm planning for Everyone! We began to wonder about all the opportunities we would be missing adopting this model---all of the urban dwellers who do not have a backyard. So we determined that focusing on COMMUNITY AGRICULTURE was the best bang for the buck. And through community gardens we were able to engage with front line communities, many of whom have limited access to land and fresh food. From there we created our Intent for the website: Compile a List of Community Gardens Provide Soil Fertility Case Studies Showcase Opportunities to Get Involved
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Working with a web designer, KCDCommunityag.org was developed. Our tagline: Bringing Food Closer to Home
Compile List of Community Gardens
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The website fulfilled our intentions, by offering a easily searchable list of community gardens in several different ways. 1. A map view
Compile List of Community Gardens
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2. Through a Garden Features view (each of these features is a hyper link that will bring up community garden sites that offer this feature.
Compile List of Community Gardens
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3. Through a individual tile view.
Provide Soil Fertility Case Studies
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We are fortunate to have the funding stream that allows us to offer 5 FREE Soil tests to all King County ratepayers. As you can imagine this is a well utilized service. We did over 1,400 tests in 2017 (including at a number of our community garden sites) and we wanted this website to offer a place to share those results.
Provide Soil Fertility Case Studies
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However, we knew that posting soil test results would have very little value to anyone.
Provide Soil Fertility Case Studies
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So we included a tab on each of the community garden site pages called “SOIL TESTING STORIES” were those results were turned into a narrative that website visitors could visit and learn. This story, for example, is from Highline College’s garden where they were experiencing blossom end rot. Their soil test showed low pH and Magnesium. They applied dolomite lime to correct those deficiencies and this along with regular drip line watering, improved calcium uptake and solved the rotten zucchini ends.
Provide Soil Fertility Case Studies
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Another story that website visitors could read is at Elk Run Farm where they are farming on a former golf course parking lot to supply fresh produce to 12 area food banks. Their soil test, not surprisingly, showed low levels of organic materials and a low CEC. This combination indicates the soils inability to hold an release nutrients. Based on these results, they decided that amending the soil with quality compost and cover cropping was their first priority.
Showcase Volunteer Opportunities
Showcase Volunteer Opportunities
www.kcdcommunityag.org
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Working with a web designer, KCDCommunityag.org was developed. Our tagline: Bringing Food Closer to Home
[email protected] Agriculture Coordinator