"Every time I went to the Chings', they fed me."
The man who said that grew up next door to Joe and Jennie Ching. He was in middle school in 1957, the year the family moved in, and he remembered them as "so sweet and so warm and so welcoming." In the years he lived there, he said, "that impression never faded."
Nearly seventy years later, the same lot at 16034 Greenwood Ave N is a public garden. Diggin' Shoreline and GROW Northwest announced it would open to visitors during daylight hours, starting with a grand opening and volunteer celebration on Saturday, October 3. Most of the new plantings are too young to bear fruit, but the garden is already giving food away. It has gone back to the work the Chings did there decades ago.
A chef's mornings and a stony lot
Joe Ching learned to cook in the Army, where he enlisted right after Pearl Harbor. Later he met Peter Canlis while working in a restaurant, and that connection brought the young family to Seattle to help open the flagship Canlis. According to Shoreline Area News' 2024 history of the project, the family looked for a home in Shoreline. Peter Canlis bought the property himself after asking whether the neighbors would welcome the family, then sold it to Joe and Jennie.
The lot they got was hard ground. Their daughter remembered many weekends of the whole family digging rocks out of it before it became what she called a "garden of Eden." Joe tended his vegetables nearly every morning and tried out organic methods before going to work as head chef at Canlis. Jennie grew flowers for ikebana and put up rows of canned vegetables each harvest season. In time the garden had fruit trees and vines, vegetables, showy flowers, a koi pond, a bridge and a pagoda. It was featured more than once on Ed Hume's long-running television show, Gardening in America.
The family also shared it. A few years after moving in, the Chings threw a luau for the whole street. They dug a pit in the backyard and filled it with hot rocks and banana leaves. As Joe and Jennie got older, they could no longer keep up with a garden that demanded so much work.
How an overgrown lot came back
The current project began during the pandemic. Kathleen Lumiere, who lived nearby, kept walking past a neglected property close to Shoreline College. Ripe plums near the property line caught her attention first. Behind them, under thick blackberry and holly, she found an orchard of heirloom apples, Asian pears, figs, grapes and persimmons. In the spring of 2021 she wrote to the Shoreline City Council proposing a community garden to honor the Chings.
The hard part was buying the property. The group won a $1.2 million grant from King County's Conservation Futures fund, which preserves open space. In April 2023, though, a fair market appraisal put the property at $1.86 million, about $660,000 more than the grant. Waiting another grant cycle risked watching the price climb again.
The gap was closed by the same restaurant family that had helped the Chings settle there. After a Shoreline Area News reader contacted the Canlis family, Mark Canlis joined the project team. The family then arranged a bridge loan from WaFd to cover the difference between the grants and the appraised value. GROW's offer was accepted in September 2023, and the sale closed on December 29, 2023. Two days later, the volunteers who had pushed the purchase through met on the property to celebrate and ended up doing an enormous amount of weeding.
GROW Northwest acquired the garden in 2023 and serves as the project's fiscal sponsor. Diggin' Shoreline organizes the hands-on work, and both groups are all-volunteer nonprofits.
What's in the ground this October
The garden that opened this month mixes old trees with new plantings. The project's photo gallery identifies several survivors from the Ching years:
- a Shiro plum
- a fig
- a juniper
- a French lilac
- a small Chinese crabapple
- a rhododendron
- a plum kept for grafting, so its variety can be carried forward
Since March, volunteers have planted more than 250 donated heirlooms and cultivars beside and under those trees, and they add more every week. The plan was to finish the lower two-thirds of the garden first. In the lower garden, groups of fruit trees, berries, Northwest natives and pollinator plants grow alongside plants native to Asia.
The design is a food forest: fruit trees form the structure, and other plants are layered underneath so that something flowers or fruits for much of the year. That design takes time to fill in. The organizers say this fall's new trees and shrubs are still far too small to fruit.
Giving before it's finished
Even so, food is already leaving the garden. Volunteers installed hügelkultur troughs in late July. Their first crop of pak choi, mizuna and komatsuna went to Shoreline Share Pantry, and the troughs have since been replanted with winter greens. Squash and pumpkins from the large giving-garden area are headed to local food banks.
The fruit has to wait. The opening announcement puts it plainly:
"With respectful treatment by visitors and careful tending by volunteers, there will be some fruits to share next year."
More money is coming for the next stage. In September, the King Conservation District announced a $48,850 grant to Diggin' Shoreline for Ching Garden infrastructure, expanding the food forest and distributing food equitably. The opening announcement separately mentions recently awarded grant funding that will let volunteers finish planting the lower-level beds. Later phases cover the upper garden where the house once stood, the patio and pond areas, and permanent signs telling the Ching family's story. Those will be built as grants and donations come in.
Visiting the garden right now
The organizers describe the garden as a work in progress, and some practical details follow from that. All of them come from the September opening announcement:
- Hours. The garden is open during daylight hours. The announcement gives no set opening or closing times.
- Paths. Stay on the wood-chip paths. The new plantings are small, and their survival depends on it.
- Fenced areas. Some sections are fenced off for safety and construction.
- Accessibility. Permanent ADA-accessible paths are planned for a later phase.
- Parking. A permanent driveway, patio and parking area are "much further down the road," and the announcement does not include current parking directions. Walking or biking in is the simplest choice for anyone who lives close by.
- Fruit. There is nothing to pick yet. The organizers expect some fruit to share next year.
Saturdays at nine
The easiest way to see the garden up close is to help with the work. Diggin' Shoreline's calendar lists Ching Garden work parties from 9 to 11 a.m. at 16034 Greenwood Ave N on Saturday, October 10, Saturday, October 17 and Saturday, October 24. The group says Saturday morning work parties continue through the fall and winter. To join, choose Ching Community Gardens on the volunteer form at digginshoreline.org or email [email protected]. Donations for construction and maintenance go through GROW, the project's fiscal sponsor.
At the moment, a two-hour Saturday shift goes into plants that won't bear fruit until next year and into winter greens bound for Shoreline Share Pantry.
At Mr Magnolia, we love stories like this one, where a family's backyard ends up feeding neighbors it never met. Every older house has its own history, and you know yours better than anyone. If you've ever wondered what your home and garden are worth today, we're glad to put together a free home valuation, with no pressure attached.