Grow Community has been honored with a coveted "Green Home of the Year Award" in the "Best Community Project" category for 2014 by Green Builder magazine.

In a feature headlined "Holistic Homes," the magazine praises Grow for "connect[ing] health and happiness with sustainability" through every element of design and construction.

The magazine highlights Grow's advanced framing techniques, weather-tight building envelopes, and locally sourced solar products among other distinguishing features. Grow is already the largest planned solar community in Washington state, with a solar component also planned for the next two phases, the Grove and the Park.

An expert panel of judges considered nearly 40 projects on criteria including overall sustainability, resilience, affordability, synergy with the environment and surrounding neighborhood, and depth of building science employed.

"Our winners combine the best of tradition and technology - homes of great beauty that are also resilient and flexible," the editors write to introduce the awards.

Jonathan Davis, architect for Grow's first phase, the Village, tells Green Builder that all the principles of One Planet Living on which the Village was designed supported the goals of health and happiness.

"When my kids go out the door, I know they're safe," says Davis, now a resident of the Village.

Read this great feature on the  Green Building website page 22.

That's literally true for the rich sea life of Eagle Harbor and Puget Sound. Sediments and other runoff from land can have a harmful effect on their ecosystem, smothering fish eggs, increasing ocean acidity, or carrying heavier pollution (like plastics) into their - our -  precious waters.

So as we continue site work for Grow phase 2, we're making sure we don't send any pollutants off into the harbor.

We've commissioned "Rain for Rent," an innovative, portable filtration system that captures and treats our runoff before it leaves the work site. The process looks like this:

First, water is channeled across the entire site and into a large sediment pond at the south end of the grounds. After heavy rains and once the water level reaches a certain point, our "pond" is pumped into the treatment system.

Then the blue "Rain for Rent" tanks run the site water through sand filters that remove sediment and pollutants, and balance pH levels to assure the water we finally discharge is cleaner than what landed on our site to begin with.

With Eagle Harbor less than a mile downstream from our several-acre worksite, we're committed to giving it all the protection it deserves. After all, lives are at stake.