Each piece of produce from a food forest or garden offers an opportunity for celebration, discussion, and social connection when we look more closely at how we can use the harvest to create deeper meaning and community fun. Apples trees, while somewhat difficult to grow due to diseases and pests,…
Free Food Can Feed the Local Food System Community Food Forests are often promoted for contributing to locally available fresh food and the local food system. However, they are also open to the public for free harvesting and many local food systems rely on economics to function and provide local…
Background I’m giving a little tribute today to the recovering Nalini Nadkarni, who is an amazing woman and ecologist. She has focused on tropical ecology and the ecology of trees most of her career. Maybe I admire her because my original passion in life was tropical forest ecology and I…
Food Forests are Motivated by Social, Environmental and Food Justice… Are Those Intentions Sufficient? One Day is Not Enough We’ve marked this day on our calendar’s to remember Martin Luther King, Jr.’s activism for equal rights for all. A struggle that is on-going, not only in the United States, but within…
The 18th and Rhode Island Food Forest in San Francisco, CA was started in 2008 on Portero Hill.
Here is a video of Kevin Bayuk, co-founder, talking about Permaculture Design at the Park:
Bee Keeping in the Food Forest:
Also here are some videos taken over a span of years that show the garden’s progression:
This video is in French taken in 2010:
Also in French taken in 2010:
Taken in 2013:
Starting Blindly I started my research last summer by visiting community food forests on the East Coast. In order to categorize what the food forests looked like physically in terms of number of species, structure (how many layers) and the functional role of plants, I used some standard vegetation sampling techniques.…
Intro The oldest community food forest on the East Coast is hidden on Parks and Recreation property near downtown Asheville, NC. I’m aging myself by revealing this information, but I was at UNC-Asheville when this food forest was being planned and established and I didn’t even know it!! When I…
I’m going to go out on a limb here and try to make an analogy that I hope will help you see food forests the way I do. Food forests, particularly community food forests, are like a passion flower. There are layers that build upon each other, with multiple components…