Today is the last day of May, in what is the forth growing season at Forested and my second since joining. We are an organization of two young fathers pushing for a profound shift in how we grow our food supply. Between the two of us we have spent 10s of thousands of hours traveling, learning, and honing our craft of designing and growing food systems that can both feed a growing human population AND do all the amazing things a thriving ecosystem can do. We are growing what we call a food forest or forest garden on 10-acres, that sits just 6 miles east of Washington, DC. (You'll see a map of the site below) I'll try to explain in the concept in the simplest terms possible... If you let any spot of ground in our Mid-Atlantic region go for 20 years it would become a multi-species forest. Well, we are letting our ground do what it wants with an important twist... we want it to grow large quantities of diverse foods, medicinals, and building materials, all without us needing to use irrigation or synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. You can read more detail about our project in this Bay Journal article.
One of the things that is very different about this method of growing is the patience it requires. Unlike the month wait from planting a row of tomatoes to the day you can take your first bite, we are in our forth growing season and getting our first large fruit haul and still have many trees that will not give us more than a nibble this year. But, what we do have already established is a huge number of blackberries, black raspberries, mulberries, persimmons and inedible pears that we can graft. These things are just popping up everywhere throughout what was a rock hard site of corn, hay and a long legacy of the Great Soil Destroyer... tobacco. Thousands of fruiting berries are growing on a site that was plowed for likely 200+ years.
These berries are delicious, but are not typically 'shelf-stable' enough to make it to market. So, in preparation for our first big year of harvest we decided to build two-solar dehydrators to help us keep up with the food that is the ground is producing. Here is a link to these amazing open-source designs by Dennis Scanlin.
Still a problem remains. How can we harvest thousands of tiny berries when we make a living by lecturing, consulting, training, designing, hosting youth groups & schools and doing the administrative necessities to keep this non-profit thriving?
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| Learning about the vast diversity of insects that thrive here. |
They are two weeks into having decided where there patches would be and have already added a great spectrum of plants. Strawberries, turkish rocket (a perennial broccoli), anise hyssop (an amazing native mint), sorrel, beach plums, nanking cherries, mulberries, along with some plants that naturally fertilize those plants, like maryland senna. They will each get three annual veggies to add this coming week and for every month they take good care of their patch, they get to choose another plant to add.
The fact that these kids and the dozens we have brought out to the site have embraced the food forest and the many "weird" foods I didn't taste until my late twenties is amazing enough. But, today that was ratcheted up a notch with a huge surprise. As Lincoln and I were teaching a Forest Garden Design & Care workshop the girls were busy throughout the day. I see the three girls carrying our huge orchard ladder some 450 feet though the trails and prop it under an established mulberry tree. As impressed as I was at their determination, I thought they would each shove a few dozen into their mouths and be done with it. Little did I know that they would spend the better part of the day picking the mulberries and bringing load after load of small tupperware containers to the dehydrators. I was inspired by their resolve and walked over after the last of our workshop attendees had left the site.
When I walked up to the ladder holding all three girls who were efficiently picking at three tiers, I could see they each had bare feet with giant purple stains on the bottom and faces that matched. They were excited to tell me that they had collected so many mulberries and that they taste soooo good. The youngest, Shauti, said "we're mulberry ferries!" That's when Sohail (the oldest at 9 years old) came out with a proposal that made my month. "Could we start a business selling all the berries we don't eat. We are dehydrating so many berries and I'm sure people would love to buy them from us!... and we could have a website!?" Then they all chimed in. "We could sell blueberries and blackberries and black raspberries and cherries and..." The list went on and on. "We can call it 'The Berry Fairies'!!!!" Sohaila said, hoping the other two girls would like the new name. And they did. Having co-founded my own project in the past, an urban-farming non-profit called Can YA Love, I was amazed with how quickly their ideas formed and consensus was made on things like a name which took me months... and I think The Berry Fairies is a great name that danced effortlessly off of the tongue of a five-year-old.
So they had to make the proposal a second time to Lincoln. He too loved the idea. So, here I am, past 3 am inspired to write this blog post on this site dedicated to our little Berry Fairies! It will be some time before they will have enough of anything to sell, but in the meantime this site will be a great place for them to write about their experience growing their own version of Eden. This is going to be a great summer!
Please show these young ladies some support in this their biggest venture so far!
Like their FB page too! This will be my last time logging a post of what will be my gift back to them some four hours from now!
Ben Friton,
Soil Ecologist and Proud Dad
