Spring Growth: Updates and Events
It’s been a very busy spring on the community food forest front (and pretty much every other front, spring is by far the busiest period of my life, no other season comes close!), both in terms of our expanding food forest coalition and in terms of the work that has been going on all over the place. We’ve begun to move towards more organizational structure, welcoming Gabe LePage as co-director and Kayla Harper as education and outreach coordinator; we’ll be introducing all the members of our emerging team in more depth later. While we develop a plan and file for our own independent non-profit status, the local faith-based non-profit organization Kingdom Partners has kindly taken us under their wing.
On the expansion front, we’re partnering with the Lookout Mountain Conservancy to develop a community food forest on their property at the Old Wauhatchie Boulders, a really cool spot at the edge of the St. Elmo neighborhood. The food forest will grow along the lower part of the property, and will be accessible to anyone hiking the trails or climbing the boulders. Gabe and Kayla have been working with the folks at LMC to develop a site plan, and while work will really begin in earnest later this year, we did an initial clean-up this spring, removing a great deal of trash of all types (excitingly during this clean-up I turned up a little green salamander (Aneides aeneus) under a brick, not a salamander one usually encounters in such settings). We’ll have more information about this exciting development as plans are finalized and work begins, so stay tuned!
We are also working on a partnership with the Emma Wheeler Homes community in the Piney Woods neighborhood near the Georgia-Tennessee line to plant a community orchard and food forest complex on a piece of land within the community; we’ve already begun partnering with them to help get their existing community garden up and going, adding a water storage system and starting a compost system as well. We’re also talking with our friends at City Farms Growers Coalition about possibly integrating a small urban farm on the site as well, pending the result of soil tests.
We’ve other possible sites and partnerships currently in the works, on which we’ll provide updates once things are more finalized- it’s very exciting to see how much interest and enthusiasm there is all across the city for this work!
Work and growing continues at our St. Elmo core site; before the weather warmed up too much we planted in most of the fruit trees and shrubs planned for the site, and have been adding perennial plants in the understory gradually. An interpretive sign and a little free library are also going in at the site; the little free library will be geared specifically towards books, magazines, and pamphlets having to do with gardening, permaculture, ecology, and the like, so if you have material you’d like to move on to another reader, please bring it by, and hopefully find something new for yourself!
Finally, we’re doing weekly activities at two locations, Ella Library and Emma Wheeler Homes; our kids’ gardening club has been going on for a few weeks now at Ella and seems to add new kids each week! We’ve worked on the raised beds there, added new plants to our food forest installation, built a new container garden, and fashioned watering cans from dried bottle gourds, among other things; in the coming weeks we’re planning on planting some more seeds and plants, learning about weeding, and building a wormery to start building up compost for on-site use. Our first Emma Wheeler session is next week, so not sure yet what we’ll be doing there, other than that for now we’ll be focusing on the annual vegetable garden beds (we do have three blackberries and an elderberry in the ground, very late season additions!). If you are interested in volunteering, or would like to bring your own kids by to participate, shoot me a message (jallen22@umd.edu).
As for wider events, we are hoping to put on a community day at our St. Elmo site, most likely May 25th (a Saturday); folks will be welcome to stop by the site, chat with coalition members, see what we have growing and review literature on the food forest concept. If anyone wants to also pull some weeds we’re not going to stop anybody (unless the things they’re pulling aren’t weeds!), but the focus will be on getting to know the site and one another and not so much on work.
Ok finally (for real this time!), if you’d like to donate material, plants, or funds, do get in touch- as we expand to work with more communities in more neighborhoods, and as we build our organizational structure, we are encountering more resource needs. For now donations can be made on a basically ad hoc basis, though we plan on setting up a regularized structure soon. I would be remiss if I did not thank everyone who has already made generous donations of time, money, labor, and plants, with a particular shout-out to our friends at LMC and to Laura Robinson at the Chattanooga Area Food Bank for the many plants from their respective greenhouses they’ve donated this spring.
