Garden Wizard Turns Urban Areas Into Edible Landscapes

https://www.opb.org/news/article/garden-wizard-turns-urban-areas-into-edible-landsc/

SEATTLE — Michael Seliga is a landscaper on a mission.

He wants people to think differently about the urban outdoors. His message is simple —- “Eat your yard.”

Seliga recently founded Cascadian Edible Landscapes, a Seattle-based landscape company that helps convert lawns and other underutilized outdoor spaces into an oasis of food production.

He has a knack for converting empty spaces into gardens abundant with food. And he does it by ripping up lawns, building raised beds or even using horse troughs to hold soil. He can work in nearly any setting — from downtown rooftops to community center parking lots to the average single family yard.

So far, he says, Seattlites have been eager to join in his cause.

“It seems that growing food skipped a generation,” Seliga says. “A lot of people’s grandparents had farms or gardens and people are yearning for that for themselves and for their families.”

While many families may want to return to their gardening roots, Seliga has found that families often feel overwhelmed by the costs and labor associated with getting started.

That’s why Seliga, his wife Stephanie, and several other people recently started the “Just Garden Project” which helps subsidize food gardens for low income families who can’t afford to build their own.

Besides producing food, Seliga hopes these gardens will bring enjoyment to people who might not have had the chance to experience it otherwise. The project already has more than a thousand volunteers in the greater Seattle area.

With the help of those volunteers, Seliga recently built a collection of individual flower and vegetable gardens for residents of the downtown Seattle Chancery Place Apartments, which provides housing for low-income seniors and people with disabilities.

Cynthia Streltzov, the building’s program director says, “The proof is in how fantastic the gardens look and that all of the residents that have gardens are actively working on them. They’re engaged. They’re sharing their produce. They’re very happy.”

Seliga hopes that by building edible landscapes, hunger will one day be a notion of the past.

“Everywhere you go, every rooftop has gardens on it and every parking strip that can have raised beds on it has raised beds,” Seliga says, describing his vision for the future. “People will laugh one day that there was this thing called hunger when there’s so much abundance.”