This section of our blog is devoted to our local economy and locally sourced food. In here you will find information and helpful tips on eating a locally sourced diet and supporting our local economy on Bainbridge Island.
Contractors in the Grow Community PHC Construction team were treated to a locally grown luncheon on the job site last week. All food for the noontime repast was grown on Bainbridge and North Kitsap farms. Local agriculture, sustainability and health are always on the menu at Grow!
Very nicely, thanks! And it’s only going to get better. The shared gardens at Grow Community promise a bounty for the table and a close-knit neighborhood to share its goodness.
Community gardens and “edible landscaping” — everything from blueberries to tree fruits, with tasty vegetables on the vine — are a key feature at Grow, and a big part of our “One Planet Living” ethos. We want to honor the land by fostering and enjoying its wholesome yield.
Now as we approach the first harvest season of our completed Village neighborhood, our gardens are really coming into their own. Residents in our new homeowners association (whose ranks include a few master gardeners, wouldn’t you know) have the happy task of divvying up the delicious fare. You gotta love it when a new sign goes up in your neighborhood, and it says, “Pick Me.”
We’re also talking to Friends of the Farms, the local non-profit that manages and promotes Bainbridge Island’s public agricultural land. We’re discussing how that group may be able to manage our orchards and gardens for an even greater yield, creating an urban farm that produces sustainable, locally grown food in volume and forges stronger community connections.
And this is just in the Village in Phase 1. With Grow Community’s next neighborhood, the Grove, which has just broken ground, and the Park neighborhood to follow, our green development will get even greener (if that’s possible). Sixty percent of the new neighborhoods will be devoted to open space including more bountiful trees and gardens.
We call our community “Grow” for a reason.
Available at Mora Iced Creamery in Downtown Winslow, just a 5 minute walk from Grow Community. For a limited time only.
Click here to learn more about the “Mora Index.”
Grow Community/Asani were honored to receive the 2012 Sustainable Business of the Year award from the Bainbridge Island Chamber of Commerce. This is an award that was truly achieved due to the support and involvement of our greater Bainbridge Island community. Thank you.
We, the Grow Team would like to wish you all a wonderful holiday season! As the days get colder and the holidays are upon us we would like to take a moment to reflect on the past year. In 2012 we opened our first three model homes to the community for tours and are now underway with construction of the next 20 homes and 20 rentals that will make up the first phase of Grow Community. After the New Year the first residents will be moving in and calling Grow home. The Grow Team has been working behind the scenes on this project for over two years now and it is wonderful to finally see the community begin to come together.
With Grow Community, we presented the concept of One Planet living – a community that allows residents to reduce their ecological footprint while maintaining a happy and healthy lifestyles. In a year where health, global climate and community wellbeing has risen to the top of our consciousness, we hope that our small project will provide an example of how we can all impact change in our communities.
We know we are incredibly lucky to be living and working on Bainbridge Island. Our island is just the place where our dream of a healthy, safe, and intergenerational community can become a reality. As Grow Community takes shape we continually strive to create a place that both fosters community and is also restorative to our earth. We are impassioned every day when we meet community members that share our vision and that are dedicated to improving the world around us.
We are thankful for our family, friends, neighbors, fellow co-workers and the community we live and work in. We hope that you will continue to contribute and help us to build positive community on Bainbridge Island in whatever way inspires you.
From our family to yours we wish you a safe and happy holiday season.
The Grow Team
The following is part of our Five Minute Lifestyle series. Living at Grow Community makes getting out your car easy with all of your local amenities and transportation needs met within a quick 5 minute walk or bike ride away. Our Five Minute Lifestyle posts are dedicated to spotlighting nearby local businesses, transportation options for residents, community resources and the spectacular local attractions of Bainbridge Island and our surrounding community.
By our Health and Happiness Champion, Leslie Schneider
As a 12-year-old, I remember well the territory I was comfortable exploring on my bike with friends and siblings. We could ride on a dirt path from the residential road through an empty lot to the usually vacant parking lot behind Safeway. The empty lot had little hills that helped us hone our bike handling skills. And the Safeway store offered us refunds for empty bottles and plenty of ways to spend the new cash.
These days, as parents we put a lot of money and time into taking care of our kids. Different families make different choices, but the community we live in makes many choices for us too. During the week we drive our kids from one activity to another, and then on weekends we drive to big box stores to provision ourselves for the coming week. These rituals can be fun… come on, admit it, Costco has us nailed, offering free samples of prepared food sold in volume, cheap pizza or a cone at the checkout. But it is not a kid’s world. We don’t feel safe letting our children run around by themselves as we shop.
Going somewhere and buying something… that is what grown-ups do. So isn’t it the Holy Grail of freedom for a kid to be able to get somewhere by themselves and purchase something of high kid-value? How many parents with school-aged children in your neighborhood would think it safe to send their kids to the grocery store alone? Architect Ross Chapin is an advocate of small scale communities. In his book “Pocket Neighborhoods”, Chapin describes what he calls the “Popsicle Index” – the percentage of people who think it is safe to let their kid walk to a store and buy a Popsicle without adult supervision.
On Bainbridge Island, we are lucky to have Mora’s Ice Cream, surely a part of many families’ ritual outings long before a kid has much independence. So. If you lived within walking distance from Mora’s in downtown Winslow, would you let your daughter walk there by herself to buy a treat?
To reach that Holy Grail safely, a child needs to start much earlier in life with smaller circles of independence, or safety zones that expand with the age and confidence of the child. A safe base creates independence. The Grow Community is designed so that no one ever crosses a street while inside the community. Courtyards between homes are the protected close-in zones, with opportunity to meet the neighbors as the first integration into the larger community. Living in this community, a child will graduate to playing alone at the community center, with helpful eyes watching out for the unexpected. It takes a community to keep an independent child safe, to contribute to raising independent children.
When children graduate to the outer circles of the community, there are many options for walking and biking—to get to two nearby elementary schools, Ordway and Odyssey, the two Island middle schools, Sakai and Woodward, and the high schools, Bainbridge and Eagle Harbor. The library and a park is even closer. The Farmer’s Market is practically across the street. Hmmm. Maybe this smaller world helps us stay out of our cars and gives our kids the autonomy they crave a little earlier!
C
heck out ‘5 Minute Neighborhood for Kids’ also written by Leslie Schneider
Leslie Schneider is a marketing and communications specialist with a history of building community. Leslie has worked with both start-ups and software giants offering messaging, marketing collateral, and training development. She is also a founding member and ‘graduate’ of cohousing, having developed and then lived in Jackson Place Cohousing (near downtown Seattle) for eight years. She served on the cohousing development LLC managing board for five years and was the owner’s representative for the 27-unit condominium construction. You can find her at Office Xpats, a co-working and conference center based on Bainbridge Island.
I decided to get involved in the Grow project after meeting Jonathan Davis. He is a long time family friend of my wife, Haripurkh Khalsa , and previous student of her father Guru Singh. Jonathan explained the One Planet concept and I was thrilled. The core of The One Planet concept is exactly how I try to live my life, and exactly where we need to be striving towards with all development. I have an electric truck, electric tools and don’t use any pesticides or harmful chemicals in my work. I have spent the last 10-15 years planning and working on community gardens and I could not believe that a private development actually could be so focused on growing food as a means to build and create community!
The network of community gardens will create a better place for the residents by (1) reducing the amount of trips they need to take to the grocery store, 2) eating and living healthier lifestyles 3) building strong friendships and community 4) donating fresh foods to local food banks 5) educating residents and the broader Bainbridge community about growing food and building sustainable community through modeling and 6) providing fun community events in the beautiful outdoor garden spaces.
I believe that the network of community Gardens built into the overall design of the Grow Community is the key piece that can make this innovative concept work. Community gardens/farms take teamwork and community involvement to run. They will serve to connect neighbors in Grow with each other, and with the surrounding community.
The shared goal for Grow is to provide an important educational opportunity for children and creating future advocates for community gardens.
A few weeks ago Scott engaged local elementary students from Madrona School in the first harvest of our welcome garden. The effort was part of an educational program in local and organic foods. The kids harvested, learnt to cook with some of the vegetables, and provided some to the local food kitchen at Helpline House on Bainbridge.
For more about Scott’s organization Alleycat Acres, click here.
Our neighbor, the Peacock Family Center has given us permission to repost a Thanksgiving message written by one of their teachers. Peacock provides family support and services for the greater Bainbridge Community. When we read this post in their monthly newsletter, we were struck by the wonderful reminder of gratitude. So often in our busy lives we forget to stop and simply be grateful for the many gifts that we experience every day. We share this gift with you in hopes that you too will find the time to pause and reflect on friendship, community and the simple things that add joy to your life every day.
Happy Thanksgiving, from the Grow Team!
November can be a time for quiet introspection in the form of gratitude and thankfulness, a time to look at what is around us and really appreciate the bountifulness of our lives and those whom we love. We all impact each other each and every day, and it is a good time of the year to reflect on this, and the gratitude that we have towards what is so fortunate in our lives.
At Peacock, we are always mindful of how we are thankful towards each other. It is a place of giving and nurturing and appreciating each other for this, a love that is ever-present from day to day. We add this piece to the holiday of Thanksgiving, and the result is a celebration of this sense of gratitude, for celebrations are necessary in our lives, marking milestones and happy occasions. It is good to step back from the stress that can sometimes filter into our lives in order to appreciate life’s simple gifts as we pause for a moment and give thanks to those around us who have shown us love and care. It is a universal celebration of gratitude.
Yet, one must also be mindful that Thanksgiving, while it is widely celebrated by many in the United States and Canada, including by new immigrants, it is not a holiday that is embraced by all. The story and traditions of Thanksgiving reflect the perspective of the European colonists, not the indigenous people who had already been living on the continent for many thousands of years. While Thanksgiving honors the struggle of a group who immigrated in search of a better life and religious freedom, it does not recognize what the cost was to the Native Americans they displaced.
So, how do you “celebrate” Thanksgiving in a mindful way, and how do you introduce young children to concepts of Thanksgiving without instilling prejudicial attitudes? I like to look at it as a moment in history when two groups of people who didn’t know each other sat down and shared food they had prepared. In sharing there is a peaceful quality, a way to bridge a gap between people who don’t know each other very well. I like to talk of the Native Americans in a contemporary, non-stereotypical way, and I like to talk of the Pilgrims as newcomers who needed to learn the ways of the people who had lived there for years and years and years, people who knew important things that the Pilgrims needed to learn in order to live here. Young children can relate to the kindness one shares with people they do not know, and how to learn about how to get along in a respectful framework.
So, in 1621, when these so-called pilgrims sat down at the table with the Wampanoag at Plymouth Colony, very important things happened besides just eating. It was the background for cultural exchange, for friendship building that crossed over differences, a vital concept that we are still working on in our culture to this day.
Edward Winslow, an English leader who attended this feast in 1621 wrote a letter home to a friend describing this first Thanksgiving: “Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with the help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time..many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others.”
Besides venison, what did they eat on that First Thanksgiving? Wild turkeys, Indian corn, goose and duck, eels and shellfish, chestnuts, walnuts, and beechnuts, beans, all kinds of squash and pumpkins, and all kinds of root vegetables. In short, for three days they feasted on food that they had harvested and hunted and carefully prepared, food that would connect two cultures and would create friendships.
Heidi Harrison, Program Supervisor. Heidi works in all of the classrooms at the Peacock Family Center, mentoring, assisting and guiding teachers in their work, supporting families, designing curriculum and arranging for field trips and community immersion. With a passion for teaching of the highest quality, a bright laugh and smile and a depth of knowledge of all things developmental, Heidi happily leads our teachers and children on their growth path.
Grow Community is an urban Net Zero neighborhood on Bainbridge Island, just a 35-minute ferry ride from downtown Seattle. With beautifully designed solar-powered homes, shared community gardens and clean transportation options, Grow allows all generations to enjoy a high-quality and healthy lifestyle.
