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Now that Summer has arrived people are busier and travel more. We now mend on Wednesday evenings  (6-8) as well as Thursday during the day (11-1).  The SignUp Genius enables you to sign up when it will work for you – and to change or delete your entry if it becomes necessary,  Please review your calendar and see if occasional participation is possible.

Mending clothes helps those with limited resources make the most of their clothing, sleeping bags, and backpacks. It also keeps repairable items out of our Waste stream. Please consider contributing some time towards this meaningful community project.

Join us this Saturday June 27th from 10-3pm! Come see a variety of gardens, from a local P-Patch (Greg’s Garden) to a restful restaurant garden (Brimmer & Heeltap); from a mini farm feeding two families to a permaculture paradise to a gravel-pathed garden. There are plenty of raised beds and starter gardens too! Tickets Here

If you’d like to help the tour go smoothly, there’s still time to sign up for day-of volunteer roles here please Volunteer Here. Please let us know if you have Questions or for More Info Volunteers get a complimentary tour ticket; come join us in the gardens of Southeast Ballard!

So many vegetables growing happily…

The new Sprouts year has been a success! In April and May we were able to give away over 800 vegetable starts which will eventually result in more produce in Food Bank bellies. In 3 deliveries, we gave 584 plants to the Ballard Food Bank itself for patrons to take and grow. At our Plant Giveaway we distributed another 250 plants to giving gardeners around the neighborhood. We’ve been working hard on creating some beautiful raised beds for our Sustainable Ballard Giving Gardens and planted another 150 or so starts in our 2 Giving Garden locations. We can’t wait to show off the beautiful gardens in the 2028 Edible Garden Tour! If you’d like to see our progress before that, contact Jenny to be a Sprouts/Giving Garden volunteer.

Curious about becoming a volunteer at our Tool lending Library? We have a new volunteer orientation this Saturday June 6th. RSVP here to receive link to join training.

Our friends at Ballard Fremont Green Streets are doing a monthly clean up of the Burke-Gilman Trail. Join them every third Sunday from 2-4pm. Meet at the corner of 8th Ave NW and 43rd Ave NW. Get outside, make our neighborhood cleaner, and enjoy time with other community members. Together we make Ballard a better place to live, work, and play!

June brings sun, colorful flowers, and afternoons under the shade of your favorite tree knitting something fabulous. Many SBK-ers are easily meeting the 26 in 26 challenge which is super impressive.

Mark your calendar for Worldwide Knit in Public (WWKIP) Day 2026. The ever fabulous Row House Knitting has secured a spot at Golden Gardens Saturday, June 13 from 10am-1pm, Tables 1-7. Walk, bike, bus or drive and knit with great people with sand and beach right in front of you. This is a free event. Feel free to rsvp here!

Next knitter meet ups are the second Tuesday of the month from 7pm-9pm at Old Stove Gardens located at 1550 NW 49th St.

Tuesday, June 9

Tuesday, July  14

Tuesday, August, 11

We knit because we love creating. We knit because we love seeing what others create. We knit because there is no such thing as too much beauty in the world.

As we know, unnecessary vehicle idling has health, environmental, and financial costs. Recently, New York City Mayor Mamdani and city officials recovered more than $9 million in unpaid idling fines from Amazon! (link to story) We don’t have NYC’s anti-idling law and citizen complaint hotline, but we can still do our part to turn off our cars and educate our neighbors to do the same – whether waiting for the bridge to open, outside school, or in the drive-through! Protect air quality, human health, and climate stability – 12 million gallons of fuel are wasted by unnecessary idling in the U.S. every day – half of that from passenger vehicles. 
To get cards or posters, or learn more, visit https://www.sustainableballard.org/idle-free-ballard/

We’re fast approaching the annual Edible Garden Tour, coming up on Saturday June 27th. We have a lovely array of gardens in the Southeast Ballard/west woodland area, from mini farms to people starting out with raised beds. We still have a few slots open for hosts south of Market and between 15th and 3rd – does that sound like you or someone you know? Let Alyssa know if you’d like to sign up!

June is busy in the garden and with tour planning – can you spend some time to make sure the tour goes smoothly? Sign up here to volunteer  or email Alyssa if you have any questions! Do you handcraft something that you’d like to donate to help thank our garden hosts for spending a day on the tour? (Ideas here (please link:https://shorturl.at/akwM0))  Volunteers get a complimentary tour ticket; come join us!

We often think about growing delicious food for ourselves and others. Sustainable Ballard has revived the Sprouts project and is growing starts/food on two adjacent properties in central Ballard to benefit food bank and giving gardens locally. Our 17th annual Edible Garden Tour will be June 27th and is a fantastic opportunity to see what our neighbors in Southeast Ballard are growing in their veggie/fruit gardens. All of this is wonderful… but what about our pollinators who make it all possible?

Several years ago after becoming concerned with the plight of honeybees Ballardites started keeping honeybees in mass! Turns out we could really use a more diverse and inclusive approach to supporting pollinators. Did you know there are over 600 species of Native bees in Washington State? Find out more about them by visiting WA Native Bee Society Keeping Mason Bees is one easy way to support more pollinators. Another simple thing we can do is to offer hydration stations for bees, wasps, birds, and others. Something as simple as turning off more of your lights at night or switching to motion sensor lights greatly improves the habitat for bats, moths, and other nocturnal pollinators. Even converting your parking stripe, or a portion of it, to pollinator attracting plants can transform our ecosystem.

Hummingbirds are one of my most favorite creatures on the planet! Every day I see our resident hummer in my garden or drinking from the water feature(fountain) in the front yard. I exclusively plant things that the hummingbird, bees, or myself eat. So the garden is full of jasmine, rose, scarlet runner beans, plum, pear, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, abelia(this one is fantastic because if you let it grow fully it will bloom late into the winter providing food for the hummingbirds during a time of scarcity), anemone, onions(the beneficial wasps love the blooms!), fuchsia, bleeding hearts, cornflower, miners lettuce, cat mint, bee balm, oregano, chives, and much much more.

Every little thing we do has an impact. For a creature as small as a pollinator serving and surviving in our urban setting it seems like we could all do a little bit more to support them. Please share your tips/photos/ideas/experiences HERE. We will share some of these out over the season. Together we can make Ballard a better place to live, grow, and thrive!

Bike Everywhere Day is the mid-month peak event for Bike Everywhere Month. This is a celebration of all types of bicycling – riding for fun, commuting to work, and biking for everyday transportation. We’ll be tabling with our friends Ballard Fremont Green Streets at the Gilman Park Celebration Station(located at 11th Ave NW and NW 53rd on the West side of the park). Pedal on over and say hello!

There will be coffee and donuts donated by Mighty-O (starting at 7:15am), swag from Seattle Streets Alliance, and you can also enter a drawing for some great prizes. There will also be a happy hour at Urban Family Brewing at 5pm – everyone is welcome! Help celebrate recent wins in road safety and learn more about the impacts of human powered transportation! Urban Family will even be hosting a pop-up bike repair station. The Happy Hour starts at 5pm, and they will draw raffle winners at 6pm.

Also, pop across the street to visit our friends at Collective Chemistry (this will be the start point for our annual Edible Garden Tour in June!) to get a photo with your bike! They will have a professional photographer on site to commemorate your BBF(best bike forever!). The will have hot coffee, stickers, and the Giro stage on a big tv.

If you bike needs attention to be Bike Everywhere ready take it to our good friends at Electric Folding Bikes NW . They service all bikes, have parts, and accessories. Also, they’re just really knowledgeable bike people. They are celebrating their 30th anniversary this year!