A garden will not feed the block. Plant it anyway.

One of our early goals was to grow food on every site, all year, so the people living there would be more secure. It sounded right. It is the kind of idea that wins applause at a design review.

Then we read the research, and this became the first question on this site to carry the label “Changed our mind.”

What the evidence says

A city lot can’t feed its residents. There is not enough ground, and in Seattle there is not enough winter sun.

Urban food is not automatically low-carbon. A team led from the University of Michigan compared 73 urban farms and gardens in five countries with conventional farming. Food from the urban sites averaged about six times the carbon per serving.¹ The cause was not the growing. It was the raised beds, sheds and paths, built from new materials and rebuilt every few years.

Money does more for hunger than a garden does. Seattle’s Fresh Bucks program gives households $40 a month for fruit and vegetables. A University of Washington study found it raised food security by about 31 percent.²

So, the claim we started with does not hold. A garden is a poor tool for food security and a doubtful one for carbon.

Why we are planting anyway

Because of what a garden does for the people who tend it.

In Denver, researchers took 291 adults from garden waiting lists and assigned them by chance: a community garden plot this year, or another year of waiting. The gardeners ate more fiber, got about 42 more minutes of exercise a week and reported less stress and anxiety.³ That is rare, strong evidence for a design decision.

The city already knows this. Seattle’s P-Patch program, begun in 1973, now runs 90 community gardens.⁴

We had the right garden for the wrong reason.

What we will build

• A garden bed for every household, there for anyone who wants it and no burden on anyone who doesn’t.
• A weekly share from a regional farm, delivered to the building. Farms grow food at a fraction of the carbon, and the money helps keep farmland in farming.
• Beds built to last, from reclaimed material. In the Michigan study, 17 of the 73 sites beat conventional farming, mostly by keeping their structures in use for a long time.
• No rooftop or indoor farms on small buildings.

What we take from this

We had the right garden for the wrong reason. If we had built it for food security, we would have measured pounds of produce, been disappointed and perhaps torn it out. Built for health and company, it will be measured by who uses it.

That is why we write the hypothesis down first. It is easier to see you were wrong when you said in advance what you expected.

Sources and notes

1. Hawes and coauthors, Comparing the carbon footprints of urban and conventional agriculture, Nature Cities, 2024. ↩
2. University of Washington, Fresh Bucks study, published in JAMA Network Open, 2025. ↩
3. Litt and coauthors, community gardening trial, The Lancet Planetary Health, 2023. Summary from the University of Colorado. ↩
4. Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, P-Patch Community Gardening. ↩