Ravenna P-Patch Community Garden

In the late 1970s, the site was an overgrown hillside with a trampled path before the Seattle Engineering Department combined a planned stairway with garden plots on the flatter ground. Opened in 1981 for eleven households, the patch soon expanded as gardeners adopted the slope to naturalize the hillside with daffodils and tulips. When an access road for an adjacent development threatened to pave over the site a decade later, the neighborhood rallied to defend it. Today, the 2,200-square-foot layout holds 18 gardening plots, keeping the hidden corridor planted in tomatoes.