Seattle's innovative and award-winning garden program, known as P-Patch, has done more than cultivate flowers, fruits, and vegetables in hundreds of gardens throughout Seattle. It has planted the seeds of community, friendship, and innovation in several of Seattle's public housing communities through its innovative Cultivating Communities program.

The effort was launched in 1995 to address a need by the Seattle Housing Authority to provide safe garden sites for many immigrant residents and to help build a community among the residents. The program now has 10 community gardens with four low-income housing communities providing organic gardening space for 120 families. Many of the gardeners are recent immigrants from Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam and Cambodia. The gardens provide fresh produce for their families and friends and help provide a sense of community for the community and the larger neighborhood. Working with grant funding, the program provides seeds and materials, while the residents themselves provide the labor and love.

Cultivating Communities has two community supported agriculture (CSA) enterprises that provide extra cash for more than a dozen families. In turn, there are more than three dozen subscribers. These are the neighbors who receive a bag of fresh organic produce for 24 weeks. Many of these shares are split among several families. With some help from P-Patch and SHA, the residents build the garden beds, plant the vegetables, and then nurture the produce until it's ripe for harvest. They manage the program and sell their produce every week throughout the summer and fall. The result is a community-based, organic gardening initiative that works. It may sound corny, but having middle-class Seattle residents interact with persons who have come to America with limited language and job skills does create strong ties that had not existed before.

I began photographing the community-supported projects in April 2002, having contacted Martha Goodlett, the coordinator of Cultivating Communities. She put me in touch with her co-worker, Bunly Yun, a wonderful man (and native of Cambodia) who can motivate the community gardeners and make even the most hardened cynic smile. Together with SHA's equally amicable and hard-working Van Vo, the two allowed men to photograph them as they transformed soil, boards, and seeds into a successful project that would make any gardener green with envy. The gardeners also have made my efforts a success.