[wordup] Seattle to Build Food Forest in Beacon Hill

[Adam Shand]

Food forests were my primary interest during the year I spent living on farms and learning about permaculture.  Food forests have been used for thousands of years in other cultures.  There's a 2000 year old food forest in Morocco and I've heard speculation that much of north east America was originally managed in a similar fashion the Indians.

Robert Hart was the first modern person to deliberately create a food forest in a temperate climate.  Martin Crawford followed on from his work, learning from many of the mistakes Robert made.  If you're interested in what temperate food forest looks like there's a video of the tour he gives online.  It's pretty amazing.

The headline says that it's the nations first and it's absolutely not.  However it's great to see Dave Jacke (the American "food forest" guy) posting in the comments.

My partner and I are in the beginning stages of creating a food forest on our land in New Zealand.

Source: http://www.takepart.com/article/2012/02/21/its-not-fairytale-seattle-build-nations-first-food-forest

It’s Not a Fairytale: Seattle to Build Nation’s First Food Forest

Seattle’s vision of an urban food oasis is going forward. A seven-acre plot of land in the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood will be planted with hundreds of different kinds of edibles: walnut and chestnut trees; blueberry and raspberry bushes; fruit trees, including apples and pears; exotics like pineapple, yuzu citrus, guava, persimmons, honeyberries, and lingonberries; herbs; and more. All will be available for public plucking to anyone who wanders into the city’s first food forest.

“This is totally innovative, and has never been done before in a public park,” Margarett Harrison, lead landscape architect for the Beacon Food Forest project, tells TakePart. Harrison is working on construction and permit drawings now and expects to break ground this summer.

The concept of a food forest certainly pushes the envelope on urban agriculture and is grounded in the concept of permaculture, which means it will be perennial and self-sustaining, like a forest is in the wild. Not only is this forest Seattle’s first large-scale permaculture project, but it’s also believed to be the first of its kind in the nation.

“The concept means we consider the soils, companion plants, insects, bugs—everything will be mutually beneficial to each other,” says Harrison.

That the plan came together at all is remarkable on its own. What started as a group project for a permaculture design course ended up as a textbook example of community outreach gone right.

“Friends of the Food Forest undertook heroic outreach efforts to secure neighborhood support. The team mailed over 6,000 postcards in five different languages, tabled at events and fairs, and posted fliers,” writes Robert Mellinger for Crosscut.

Neighborhood input was so valued by the organizers, they even used translators to help Chinese residents have a voice in the planning.

So just who gets to harvest all that low-hanging fruit when the time comes?

“Anyone and everyone,” says Harrison. “There was major discussion about it. People worried, ‘What if someone comes and takes all the blueberries?’ That could very well happen, but maybe someone needed those blueberries. We look at it this way—if we have none at the end of blueberry season, then it means we’re successful.”

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.spack.org/pipermail/wordup/attachments/20130405/0c6885ec/attachment.htm>