For our 1st release of our 25 years of GRuB, we’re telling the story of how GRuB came to be. GRuB was formed as a merger of Sister Holly Community Gardens and the Kitchen Garden Project, when our founders, Blue Peets and Kim Gaffi put their heads together to create something truly special.
Blue Peetz was an Evergreen student studying Agriculture. He took a class about the power of community gardens, which impacted him so much that he started the Sister Holly community garden, where GRuB still resides today. The original landowner, Bonnie Turner, had a garden built for her by the Kitchen Garden Project, and had already started to host gardening groups in her backyard. Blue met with Bonnie in 1996, and began growing food on her land to distribute to the senior center.
Around the same time, Kim Gaffi was studying Urban Ecology at Evergreen, and was introduced to Blue through a group project of 5 students who were to grow food and host groups of children at Sister Holly. After that Spring, the other students moved on, but Kim stayed and started studying soil science.
After a while of Kim and Blue running the Sister Holly community garden, they were approached and asked to build gardens for seniors because of all the positive effects gardening had been proven to have for elderly community members. Kim and Blue contacted Rich Doss of the Kitchen Garden Project to learn more about the garden building process. Rich convinced them to ask for funding for programming with the seniors along with the garden builds. Paid for the first time, Kim and Blue got to work with seniors at the St. Francis House, a program that went from 13 participants to 60 in the next season!
In 1999, Community Youth Services approached with the idea of hosting teenagers on the farm for their summer jobs program. With this new crew of youth, the Downtown Intergenerational Garden (DIG) was born. Port of Olympia offered Kim and Blue a piece of land that had previously been a parking lot downtown, and soon after the garden beds were installed. Youth in the program were now working at DIG, Sister Holly, and the St. Francis House. The DIG was really what put Kim and Blue on the map. There was a lot of press and buzz, and they were ready to use this publicity for good.
After this first transformative Summer working with youth, Kim and Blue knew that this was exactly the work they wanted to be doing.
After their second Summer working with youth, in 2000, Rich Doss met with Kim and Blue to ask if they’d adopt the Kitchen Garden Project, as he was ready to retire from it. They said yes! Shortly after, all Sister Holly programming was under the Kitchen Garden Project, inheriting their nonprofit status. In 2001, they officially merged and renamed Garden-Raised Bounty (GRuB). A board of directors was formed, the Downtown Intergenerational Garden was taken down, GRuB was building around 100 gardens a year with the help of youth, and GRuB had their first farm manager!
In 2004 the Rooted in Community (RIC) summit was held at GRuB, and Kim notes that that was when she felt like GRuB was “fully formed” and something of its own.
We are so grateful to Blue Peetz and Kim Gaffi for their willingness to say “yes!” to so many of these uncertain, but beautiful opportunities that led to the creation of our amazing GRuB. We are also thankful to Rich Doss, Bonnie Turner, and all the other people who supported this journey and still support us today. We wouldn’t be GRuB without “u”!
