Seattle | Backyard Roots

You can tell Ingela is a designer. Everything in her small Seattle yard does double duty, saving her time, providing food, keeping it simple. Cleaning the chicken coop is easy when the compost bin is right out the window. The coop also has a green roof that doubles as insulation, with multiple easy-access doors for storage and collecting eggs. Along with her chickens, she also keeps several mini goats that provides her with milk and cheese.

She makes use of every inch of her space pruning dwarf fruit trees into edible fences. It’s no surprise that Ingela teaches pruning with her business Green Darner Garden Design. “To sum it up,” she says, “my biggest passion is beautiful, productive urban food production”

Ingela was born in Sweden and raised “by a bunch of Swedes in Seattle” and she must of learned a thing or two from them. Her favorite farm tools included plenty of goat proof hardware, a battery powered Coleman lantern and a very cool “precision garden dump cart” that can handle up to 600 lb. It was all well-designed, simple and useful. Who wouldn’t want it for their own backyard?

some examples of Ingela’s favorite goat-proof hardware and the indispensable coleman rechargeable lantern

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Check out this rooftop garden above Bastille Café in Seattle’s Ballard District. It’s one of the most deluxe that I got to visit while working on Backyard Roots. With 4800 square feet of growing space the building had to be retrofitted to hold the weight. But the garden provides a lot of produce: in the summer 50-100% of the restaurant’s greens come right off the roof.

Colin McCrate of Seattle Urban Farm Company designed the clever planting boxes that have shade covers built right in. They can be raised or lowered depending on the weather. He worked closely with chef Jason Stoneburner to figure out produce that’s interesting and fast growing.

You can visit the roof top garden June to September and have a cocktail too. Tours happen every Wednesday at 5pm and the $15 price includes a drink made with rooftop herbs. Learn how to grow produce like a pro from Colin and his partner with their new book, Food Grown Right in Your Backyard.