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

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

 

 

Forget meadows. The city’s new park will be filled with edible plants, and everything from pears to herbs will be free for the taking.

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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This is soo awesome! I hope

Guest's picture

This is soo awesome! I hope this catches on and goes global! I had a thought about doing this for our community, for the homeless, the less fortunate, and for anyone who just loves to garden and eat fresh fruits and vegetables. Why should we have to pay for what God gave us for free? Oh yea, because man created money for power and greed and people had to go to work and didn't have time to raise their own food anymore and once the government got ahold of our food they could then add whatever needed to make us sick and allow the medical industry to flourish and one thing just led to another and we soon found we had lost most all of our power but we are awakening and coming back better than ever before and it's soo exciting to be apart of the transition:) Low and behold, we've searched the world over but have finally realized that what we've been looking for has been right there inside of us all along!

True

Guest's picture

Very true! We must get back to the garden and create more of these everywhere!! :D In balance with the planet not opposed to the planet through greed and ego serving agendas but through Love and knowing our place within the ecosystem of our mother earth and her beautiful loving waters of life and love ~~~♡~~~ DenRA