Evanston P-Patch Dusts Off Master Plan to Build Paths

Sep 7

3 min read

By Erik Hansen

Nestled along the former Interurban Rail line in north Seattle at 101st Ave. N. and Evanston Ave. N. sits one of the understated jewels of Seattle’s beloved community garden network, the Evanston P-Patch. Established in 1974 and hosting 83 gardener plots, communal berry patches and flower gardens, and several large giving-gardens serving the Greenwood Food Bank, Evanston takes up nearly half a block of sunbathed soil beneath the high-voltage transmission towers running through the Greenwood and Broadview neighborhoods. For the past decade, the garden has undergone a significant infrastructure transformation, with the latest project, supported by GROW’s microgrant program, wrapping up this past November.

It all started in 2016 when the Evanston P-Patch garden leadership secured $70,000 in grants from the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods to create a master plan for renovating the garden. After months of community involvement from the gardeners and the neighborhood, the landscape architects helping shepherd the process produced a master plan to renovate Evanston’s aging infrastructure.

At the time, there were three major concerns the gardeners wanted to address:

The lumpy and non-wheelchair-friendly main path
The original dilapidated chain-link fence surrounding the garden
The aging plumbing and water-spigot stations.

Making the paths compliant with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines was the driving force behind seeking grants to create a master plan, but the focus changed when the build estimates arrived. The Evanston gardeners decided to have the old fence torn out and a new cedar and coated-chain-link fence installed with two artfully done entryways with wide swinging gates, one on the north end of the garden and one on the south.

With the fence project underway, most of the grant money ran out. However, the Evanston garden leadership, along with our friends in the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods (SDN) P-Patch Program office, managed to secure funding to finish building out the broken water-pipe and inadequate watering stations while also finding ADA-grade bark to make the paths a bit more wheelchair and scooter friendly.

But then the master plan was literally shelved and rolled up, and the effort went into hibernation as life outside of the garden embraced the leadership and danced them away from their intense renovation focus. The gardeners knew the paths were still inadequate, but then years went by and no more grant money was sought. That ended in the summer of 2025 when the Evanston leadership applied for a $1,000 GROW microgrant to have the paths and the parking lot rebuilt, and the master plan emerged from hibernation.

Most of this new-grant money was put toward heavy equipment rental. However, their close relationship with Evanston’s representative at SDN, Alicia Choi, yielded huge dividends for the effort. Alicia managed to secure about $7,000 to put toward raw materials to make this new, large effort happen. Choi arranged for the garden to get two dump truck loads of sand and gravel along with a pallet of red bricks to make a proper, ADA-compliant main path and front-gate parking area.

Work on building the new path began in earnest on November 7, 2025 with Aurora Rents delivering a mini-excavator, a 500-lb compactor, and a compact loader to the garden. The following day, two huge dump trucks unloaded the gravel and sand onto the garden’s north and south parking lots. For the next three weekends, a steady group of gardeners used the heavy equipment to scrape and dig out a four-foot-wide and six-inch-deep bed along the north-to-south main path. The rich topsoil they removed was used to build up some of the garden’s neglected plots and all of the communal flower beds.

With the path leveled out, dozens of volunteers then scooped and spread compact-loader-bucket-full after bucket full of quarter-inch gravel along the freshly excavated area to a depth of 4 inches. Several runs with the compactor, followed by a two-inch layer of top-layer sand and more compacting, yielded a water-permeable, brick-bordered, and ADA-compliant north-to-south main path.

For the main, south-end parking area the process was repeated with one major addition, the installation of a French drain to eliminate a perpetual soggy spot near the front gate. The true test of the Evanston gardeners’ work came a few weeks later when the first of the December rains fell. The path, parking areas, and French drain all handled the downpours perfectly, a testament to the Evanston gardeners’ years of planning, consistent hard work, and committed community engagement.