Friendships can blossom within Seattle's P-Patches

I don't especially like compost. But I've grown to like people who do, and on this thin thread hangs - perhaps - the making of a column.

The best compost in this city, if not the world, is found down at the Interbay P-Patch. Interbay P-Patchers say that if you plant a carrot in their compost, the results are spectacular.

They say this planted carrot will shoot up in record time, almost like a rocket off Ivar's fireworks barge on the Fourth of July.

"Our compost is miraculous," Jon Rowley says. "We have what we call celebrity compost. Well-known Seattle people come down here on Saturdays to fluff up our compost."

Rowley is co-director, with Ray Schutte, of the Interbay P-Patch. A congenial, older fellow named Pappy Watkins is another compost expert.

Interbay is one of 54 P-Patches in Seattle. We are known for our music, our opera, our theater and our sports teams. But we also are known, nationwide, for our major-league P-Patches.

The idea of urban gardens began here in 1973 and has spread to other large cities.

Seattle's P-Patches have been established at four public-housing developments - NewHolly, Rainier Vista, Yesler Terrace and High Point.

"The gardeners here are immigrants, mostly Southeast Asians and East Africans," explains Jim Diers, director of the city's Department of Neighborhoods, which deals with a lot of things, including P-Patches.

Diers points out that in 1998, Seattle hosted the 25th annual gathering of the American Community Gardening Association.

"They came from all over the world," Diers said. "We even had the director of urban agriculture for Havana with them. I went down to visit Havana, and they had a sign posted, `The Revolution is Underground.' "

This is a big week for the Interbay P-Patchers. Just out is the national magazine Organic Gardening, featuring a lively piece by Seattle journalist Sally Deneen.

Talk to almost any P-Patcher and he or she will tell you there is more effective therapy to be found in a P-Patch than you will find in a bushel of psychiatrists.

One notable gardener I met is Susan Casey. She is on the board of directors of a 12-person, nonprofit group called Friends of the P-Patch.

They have to deal with a lot of things, including the fact that some of the more popular P-Patches have a two- or three-year waiting list to get in. Once in, you get a 400-square-foot plot of ground, with plenty of help to grow almost anything.

Susan, for example, is a year-round gardener - kale, leeks and collards. Last winter she gave a food bank 40 pounds each of kale and leeks.

As Susan points out, P-Patching provides a rich mix of interactive people - lawyers, the homeless, academicians, doctors, techies and people on welfare. Susan works in Family Medicine Research at the UW.

This mix, unavoidably, gets to know each other, learns to be tolerant and helpful; each P-Patch is a kind of minimalist laboratory in the workings of democracy.

It hardly seems necessary at this point to say that P-Patches are all organic. The introduction of a pesticide would be like introducing a flu bug into a day nursery.

Romance even blossoms near the compost pile.

Deneen recounts the romance that developed at the Interbay P-Patch between gardeners Yen Chin and Pat Hoban.

They took their vows only a few feet away from the "compost social" going on. While the compost pile of eggshells, carrot pulp, oyster shells, eelgrass and spent coffee grounds seethed under a wet burlap cover, Chin and Hoban said their "I do's."

A compost lecture was in full voice, Hoban said, "which we thought was great - absolutely. The garden has such good energy."

Emmett Watson's column appears Wednesdays in the Local section of The Times.