05/12/2023
Exploring Food Forests
Our first Saturday workshop on May 6th was a great opportunity to learn about Backyard Food Forests. Larry Saltzman shared his many years of experience and explained how his process in designing Mesa Harmony Garden could be used to create food forests in our own backyards. He told us that food forests may result from using permaculture design, but have also been observed in different parts of the world thanks to indigenous ecosystem management practices. He emphasized the importance of designing to fit local conditions, for example how in our Mediterranean climate we can grow fruit trees in much closer proximity than would make sense in more temperate zones.
At the end of the workshop, participants joined Larry in a guided exploration of Mesa Harmony Garden’s Community Food Forest, as he pointed out the different elements of the design and responded to the many questions and comments from the participants. People asked about the benefits of different understory plants, and how we capture and store rainwater, and of course wanted to know which kinds of fruit trees are doing well.
A friend recently shared an article that expanded my thinking about urban food forests to include the idea of Neighborhood Food Forests. This article described a community where neighbors are working together to reshape their sidewalks so that they “… are lined with native, food-bearing trees and shrubs fed by rainwater diverted from city streets”. [https://flip.it/BMsV9r].
This initiative is coordinated by the Dunbar/Spring Neighborhood Foresters, based in the Dunbar Spring neighborhood of Tucson, Arizona. According to their website, they have focused their efforts on rainwater harvesting and planting native plants: “Since 1996 we’ve collaborated with our neighbors to plant over 1,600 native food- and medicine-bearing trees and many hundreds of multi-use native understory plants”.
Mesa Harmony Garden donates fresh produce to the Food bank, and acts as a demonstration site for sustainable, regenerative urban landscaping. We hope our achievements will encourage others with under-utilized land at their disposal to re-design these spaces as urban food forests that could also be of service to our wider community… whether that’s in a backyard, a shared community space or throughout a neighborhood.
Feel like being inspired? We’re here every Saturday morning, 9am-12pm – come and join us, there’s always more to learn. To keep informed about Mesa Harmony Garden, join our email list at www.mesaharmonygarden.org.
