Scattered Forest: Project Response to Destroyed Community Garden
January 17, 2014, 5:40 pm
Filed under: Events, Food Forest, Pod updates, The Gardens, Uncategorized | Tags: Community Gardens, east vancouver, food sovereignty, food trees, fruit trees, youth gardens
Filed under: Events, Food Forest, Pod updates, The Gardens, Uncategorized | Tags: Community Gardens, east vancouver, food sovereignty, food trees, fruit trees, youth gardens
The Purple Thistle Gardeners are stoked to let you know about our new Food Tree initiative starting this winter. As most of you are aware, our Food Forest was destroyed by a neighboring property owner. Most of our plants were cut down and chopped up. This is really sad, especially in that we had really close relationships to those plants. However, the folks who tore out the gardens had the heart to save all of our trees by transplanting them into paint buckets, which we drilled holes into so they wouldn’t drown. Now we have 41 food trees, mostly fruit and some nut trees, that need new homes so they can survive and thrive.
This is where the Scattered Forest Project comes in. The city has asked us not to work on the Food Forest site for the time being, and the gardeners are focused primarily on saving those trees. We got together and figured out how we would like to do that, while keeping them accessible within the community!
We are looking for folks in the East Van neighborhood to act as community hosts and caretakers for the trees. Our Food Forest was a project to create a self-sustaining permaculture garden completely open to the public. All of the food we grew was for everyone in the community. Even as we separate the trees and find them new homes, we wish to keep those values.
So here is what we are looking for:
-Folks with space accessible to people walking by (front yards, back yards)
-Folks available to care for the trees, with an idea of how to keep caring for them as time goes on (long-term strategy to keep the trees in the community)
-Folks willing to try growing their trees using permaculture techniques (planting guilds to create biodiversity and symbiotic relationships)
-Folks willing to share their resources, knowledge, experience with others so we can learn from and help each other grow clean food, and build solid community with our neighbors.
The trees will be given out in mid-February. We will be setting up a workshop for hosts to learn tree-pruning, and organize a meet-up/potluck date for the hosts to meet each other, so we can create a system of support within the community. In March, when all of the trees are planted, we will be organizing a community bike tour, where the public will be brought to each site and can meet the trees with their hosts. We will also be giving participants of the bike tour a community map that shows each site of the Scattered Forest.
We are in the planning stages of this project. If you are interested in helping organize with us, we have weekly meetings Tuesday at 6pm at the Purple Thistle 975 Vernon Dr. If you are interested in being a host, please send us an email to scatteredforest@gmail.com.
Mulch Love!!
Scattered Forest Folk
1 comment
radicle beets 