Six months ago I joined the board of an organization called Edible Landscapes of Yamhill County, ELOYC for short.
I had met them at our library, where a permaculture designer gave a lecture on Food Forests, and when I started chatting with the neighbor to my left, I found out that ELOYC was hatching plans to create a large one. After the lecture, I approached the president of the board and asked her if we could meet for coffee and discuss ways in which I could be involved in their project.
As it turned out, they needed new board members, so I prepared myself for an interview, and a few weeks later I became a member of the board.
There was much to learn about what Edible Landscapes does, and their activities are evolving and increasing, much to my delight.
A carload of seedlings on their way to be planted in the community, for all to share.
The first project I took part in was building raised beds for a Head Start – the children would soon have immediate access to fresh food which they had helped to plant and raise.
Children, especially little ones like the ones who go to Head Start, love hands-on learning, and we know how much kids love to get their hands into the dirt!
That was just the first phase of that project. Since then, we filled those raised beds with vegetables, herbs, and strawberries and planted a few trees in the ground, and we installed garden beds and trees in four more Head Starts this month.
A volunteer shows small children how to plant seedlings.
Even very young children enjoy planting vegetable seedlings.
We’ve provided garden beds for big kids too – a local high school received a large set of raised beds which they filled with edible plants. They use the plants in their culinary classes as well as a gardening class. We recently had a celebration of the project at the site, and the culinary class teacher created lovely hors d’oeuvres for the occasion, using produce from the garden beds. The metal working students honed their skills by making signs for the garden.
What started out as some donated planter boxes grew into an integrated program of gardening, biology, cooking, and metalworking.
Another project we’re working on is the creation of a food forest on some private land that was set aside for it, and much of the food grown will be donated to our local food bank. This is a large project, which will require grants, education, and recruitment. The idea is that once the food forest starts producing, we will offer classes on food preparation and preserving, including canning, dehydrating, and fermenting, for in addition to the need for more available fresh food, there is a need for knowledge about how to preserve and cook the produce.
While one can attend lovely and deluxe permaculture design workshops, in which the student learns how to save and catch water, how to build a dam, and how to create a beautiful healthy garden and grow huge amounts of delicious food, I’ve rarely seen a course that includes at least some information on cooking and preserving. (they also rarely mention seed saving). It’s important for people to experience how delicious fresh food can be. If they don’t know what to do with the produce, eventually they’ll stop growing and caring for it.
The goal of planting this local food forest isn’t just to produce and give away a lot of food. Our hope is that the community will learn how to care for the plants, how to know when to harvest, and how to use the produce; with this education, the community will become more resilient, all while we rehabilitate the land.
We’re also installing a food forest at Blanchet House, a men’s recovery facility out in the country near us. The facility has a woodshop, bee hives, some livestock (none are killed), and an annual vegetable garden, and the men living there already learn cooking, food preservation, woodworking, and beekeeping. Soon they’ll be learning how to care for trees as well. Getting one’s hands in the dirt has a healing effect on a person.
About a month ago we planted a garden, complete with fruit trees and perennial bushes, at an Aspire community, which is a Habitat for Humanity development.
The goals here are similar to our goals for our food forest: better access to fresh food, education and strengthening of the community, and reduction of food miles.
Students from a local private high school came and cut down the cover crop before planting the vegetable starts in the bed. While the students learn regenerative ways of gardening, the residents benefit from all the fresh vegetables planted.
Big kids like to plant a garden too!
Our most recent event took place last weekend – a giant veggie start giveaway. The event was a festival of ethical and sustainable ways of living: Zero Waste held a compost palooza, a candlemaker sold her beeswax candles made from organic beeswax that was ethically harvested, permaculture gardeners sold perennial plants, the soil and water district had an educational booth with information on invasive plants and conservation, and we gave away some 4000 plants. We had started about 3000 plants six weeks before, and then we received donated plants from local nurseries and gardeners. One nursery gave us hundreds of Brown Turkey Fig trees!
The work of Edible Landscapes is blossoming!
We have many new projects in the works, and the ideas keep coming. How about a program of pairing people who have no land to grow anything on with people who wish they had a food garden but are physically unable to do it themselves because of age, disability, lack of knowledge, or lack of time? Or a series of classes that runs all year? And what about a program full of information on where people can glean fruit from trees in public spaces?
There are so many possibilities.
And the need is enormous.
Sometimes, when I look at the problems we’re facing in this world, I am overwhelmed. I can’t even take it all in: ocean acidification, ocean trash, microplastics everywhere (even in our brains), PFAS and many other toxins, loss of topsoil due to plowing and monocultures, the death of honeybees, species’ extinctions, climate change, loss of fresh water sources, habitat destruction from mining and construction, as well as the social problems we’re seeing worldwide.
I’m just one person out of eight billion, so what effect can I have?
My sphere of influence is small, but working together with other people who are passionate about solving these problems amplifies my effect.
If we can plant one hundred trees, we’re sequestering carbon, providing food for humans and non-humans, providing habitat, making our towns more beautiful, and improving people’s lives.
If we set up vegetable beds in low-income neighborhoods and provide guidance on how to grow and cook the vegetables, we’re not only making those people more resilient, but also lightening the burden on wildlands, reducing the need for the plow, one household at a time. And we’re reducing fuel use by growing the food right where it will be used.
If we plant more native plants and pollinator gardens, maybe we’re providing refuge and nutrition to native pollinators as well as honeybees. The bees will reward us by pollinating the plants and increasing our harvest.
Bill Mollison told us that cooperation, not competition, will enable us to live ethically and truly sustainably.
If cats can cooperate, surely we can too.
As word of ELOYC’s work spreads, others may emulate or even improve on our model. And that is the goal – to make food available to people and animals by planting edible landscapes wherever possible, slowly creating a thriving wilderness park, one household, one neighborhood, one city at a time.
We need to heal the land, and this is a great place to start, right here, right where you are, in your neighborhood, in your parking strip or backyard. Collette O’Neill said, “Plant like your life depends on it, for it does”. I couldn’t say it any better than that.
