February Progress Update and Spring Plans
Our Presidents’ Day work session was a definite success: we had beautiful weather, really the sweet spot between not too chilly but not too warm (we’ll be getting plenty of the latter at future work days!), sunshine, the works. At our St. Elmo site we finished up some things that we’d started at the previous work day, digging out our berms and filling in the trench side with sticks and dead leaves, material that will help to hold everything in place in the short-term and long-term will break down into organic matter. We marked out paths, trimmed branches from the remaining Leyland cypresses, and spread more woodchips from the pile generated by Scenic City Arborists earlier in the winter; plus we planted Jerusalem artichoke tubers, some yarrow starts, and a spicebush- not quite our first tree but among the first! We also began to figure out where exactly to plant what, and will be filling in trees and shrubs as they become available (a lot of nurseries have set shipping times, though in a year like this, and last, that can be a bit problematic due to earlier than historically normal warm weather).
After a couple hours at the St. Elmo food forest site some of the volunteers headed over to ELLA Library in Cedar Hill, where we undertook our first major building project, building a multi-functional fence out of pallets to protect our plantings from errant soccer balls and the like, while also providing play spaces and growing bays. We’d been accumulating pallets for a few weeks, and have enough now remaining for additional projects in the near future. The pallet fence isn’t done yet- we’ll continue to add to it, paint it, and once we’ve collected enough concrete blocks build some strawberry beds in some of the bays. As you might be able to see from the photos there are now a couple of fig trees, a couple of plums, a blackberry, and a raspberry planted in, with a few more things to come!
As spring rapidly approaches, we will begin planting out in earnest: our next work day is schedule for March 23 (see the description in the events part of this website), and we will most likely have an additional work day April 6 for volunteers with the city’s Day of Service, originally scheduled for Martin Luther King Jr Day but postponed due to (our one real significant!) burst of winter weather. There are some other possibilities in the works that I won’t go into here, but suffice to say we have a lot planned for this growing season, and a lot that might transpire in the future as we build out this community food forest project in greater depth and breadth! In the meantime, if you have plants you would like to donate for planting purposes, you can contact me directly via email (jallen22@umd.edu will get the fastest response), and/or make a note on this spreadsheet: Food Forest Plants Started/Seeds On Hand/Wish-List/Plus Trees and Shrubs.
Finally, for those interested in learning more about how this project got started, I recently wrote an essay detailing its history (which sounds kind of funny when being applied to something that isn’t even a full year old), have a look here: From the Ground Up: How Our Community Food Forest Project Began, and Where It Might Go.
Looking forward to a productive spring and fruitful summer! And as always, thank you so much to the volunteers and supporters who have made all this progress possible, it’s absolutely beautiful to look at what we’ve built and planted already and to think about all the hands (and hearts and backs and feet…) represented there.
