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Street Gardening With Parking Strips
Bring Your Block to Life
Recent years have seen the rise of urban farming help to both beautify neighborhoods and provide affordable, sustainable nourishment to families in need. With an increasingly developed city like Tacoma, though, viable areas in which to plant a garden are becoming somewhat scarce. Industrious urban planters have started capitalizing on those unused bits of earth known as parking strips. After all, why let them sit untouched and just keep our sidewalks and cars company when they can be transformed into a personal garden? And, besides some minor legal requirements to address, this is a relatively easy project to undertake.
Thanks to recent changes in City of Tacoma policy, you don't even need a permit to plant a garden in your parking strip anymore, which significantly reduces the red-tape headaches you might've gotten in the past. All the city requires is that your garden is contained in a raised bed, and that it allows enough room for cars and pedestrians to pass by unimpeded.
Detailed information on how to set up your garden according to city standards can be found at tacomapermits.org, but here are the main things to keep in mind: the raised bed can be no higher than two feet, and you must allow two feet of space separating the garden from all curbs and sidewalks. If you're planting more than one garden, they must be kept at least three feet away from each other, to allow a path between the sidewalk and street. In essence, you've just got to be conscientious of your fellow Tacoman.
Once you've built your gardening area
according to the city's specifications, all that's left to do is prepare it
like you would any garden: spread soil, mulch, a border of wood chips, and
whatever else you think would best result in a thriving home for vegetation.
From there, any and all flowers or delicious produce you choose are yours to
cultivate in the middle of the city! A nifty solution to a modern problem,
urban gardens enrich and elevate every environment they're in. Parking strips
are there for the planting.
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