Take Part, by Clare Leschin-Hoar, February 21, 2012
Hungry? Just head over to the park. Seattle's new food forest aims to be an edible wilderness. (Photo: Buena Vista Images/Getty Images) |
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.”
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