Abstract
Orion Kriegman, MPP, Executive Director and Founding Member, Boston Food Forest Coalition, Boston, Massachusetts (
When we design a food forest, we are planting in the three dimensions of the space. When you look at a farm, one sees that it is relatively flat and contains rows and rows of the same crop. So we are not planting a monoculture, such as industrial farming does, and we are not designing a community garden, which also is very flat, because people are trying to maximize sunlight for their annual crops. Our work is not even focused primarily on annual crops. Instead, we are focusing on perennials that, once planted, will come back year after year and actually come back stronger. When one first puts a tree in the ground, it doesn't produce very much, so the planting is for 10 years down the road, when that tree will be abundant in its fruit crop.
What we are planting when we plant food forests are called polycultures. For example, next to a fruit tree, one might want to put a plant that specifically has deep taproots, because they will be dynamic mineral accumulators and will make accessible minerals from deep in the soil to the tree roots that otherwise the tree wouldn't have access to. A comfrey plant can do that nicely, or borage. Some of the other roles plants play are in attracting beneficial insects or fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere into the soil.
The other piece of planning a food forest is that the soil in the city is often contaminated by lead, because there used to be lead in gasoline—even more so than the lead in paint, which was also a problem—but the leaded gasoline was like an aerosol spray, and any soil that was near the road has what we would call medium lead levels. Some places have higher levels, some have lower levels, but on average when we encounter a vacant lot in the city, it generally has a medium range of lead levels. In this range, it's not a heavily contaminated space, and it's safe to plant perennial crops. Woody perennials won't uptake heavy metals into their fruiting bodies, and the fruit and the flowers are safe to eat (there might be lead in other parts of the plant such as the bark or the leaves).
In a food forest, we also think about regenerating soil, which means adding organic matter and dealing with compaction, because what kills soil and turns it into lifeless dirt, in the city especially, is the weight that we put on it when we walk, and drive over it, and put machinery on top of it. When we crush things that way, there aren't any air pockets, so there's no space for the good bacteria and the fungal life to exist or for water to trickle through. So part of the work is putting those air pockets back into the soil and then adding organic matter, and nature starts to do the regenerative work. We catalyze it, and then nature takes over. When one does this, one is also, over an extended period of time, diluting the heavy metals. That is ultimately an approach to heal the land, using the soil where it is found rather than digging up the topsoil and carting it away, which is very carbon-intensive. It is better to figure out the methods we can use to heal on-site, and that includes good design principles.
When the Egleston Community Orchard, Jamaica Plain, MA, started in 2010, we were able to partner with Boston University, Boston, MA, graduate students who had access to a spectrometer, and they did a detailed grid analysis on the lead content of the soil. This helped us to determine that the back of the lot had more contamination, so we built a patio there and capped that space so that we were not digging or walking in it. In the front of the lot where there was less pollution, we emphasized that as a place to put our plants.
We can get a lot of crops into small spaces because we're growing from the tree canopy at the highest level to the understory trees below that to the shrubs and fruiting bushes to the herbaceous level. We can create mounded agriculture or raised bed boxes with fresh soil in it and geotextile barriers that stop the plant roots from growing into the contaminated soil. As one can see, in our food forests, we are thinking about all of the dimensions of space and the relationship between plants and planting them intentionally in ways that support each other. Smart design and planning and looking at the whole system of the space is a big part of what a food forest requires and is essential.
In order to not be considered a guerilla garden—which is an illegal squatting garden where the land isn't actually owned and all of the investment in creating the garden could be lost—for a legal garden you have to have a certain legal structure. This is what the Boston Food Forest Coalition, which is a community land trust, has created. Boston Food Forest Coalition has the insurance and can actually take deeds of the property and ensure that it's going to remain a community open space in perpetuity. There are not that many nonprofit, community land trusts in Boston that work on open space, because it's not a revenue-generating proposition. When you think about the classic urban community land trust, it's doing affordable housing development, which has a certain economic model built into it through rent and sales of property. But with open space there's no revenue generation, so there are not that many organizations that have specialized in this area and the neighborhood volunteers need support. We are one of the organizations that are available to meet people where they are and support them.
Neighbors came together to say, “Hey, I'm doing a project,” like the Egleston Community Orchard, which predated the formalization of the Boston Food Forest Coalition (2015) and was one of the founding initiatives and linked up to others who were doing similar projects, like one called Festival Gardens. People started linking projects together and asking, “How do we ensure that these things we have started don't go away and that they are here to stay?” We reached out to other existing nonprofits, but many already had their hands full with projects, so we formed our own coalition. We needed a land trust, and the land trust is called the Boston Food Forest Coalition.
It was very abstract work centered on position papers and thought pieces, which was important work, but there was a part of me that was wondering: how do we translate these ambitious ideas of civilizational shift into practical things that the average person can engage with? How do we make tangible and real the call to think globally and act locally? Or the other call that's often quoted, to think systemically and act holistically? But that is not always easy to carry out.
I remember attending many conferences where I realized that it is a challenge for the human mind to really think in a holistic space – we tend to move into analytical space. The other thing that was challenging is that we are dealing with communities in Boston that don't have a lot of say over their urban environment. The urban environment is changing around us; the pace of development is rapid; families that were in the neighborhood of Egleston Square, where I moved in and bought a home in 2010, by 2015 had been displaced economically (aka, gentrification) or had moved on because of economic or life opportunities elsewhere.
The reality in the United States is that communities change and there is a lot of transition—sometimes forced, sometimes chosen—but community is only built at the speed of trust, and especially when you're building relationships across divides of language, culture, race and class, in diverse urban neighborhoods, and when people don't speak the same language, trust takes time. However, when people invest that time and build those relationships and then the individuals are forced to move away, the web of relationships breaks and need to be established all over again. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts in that sense and connectivity suffers. So there are some deep questions about how we can act as neighbors and then act in our communities to take some control over the destiny of the development and the shape of the urban environment in which we live.
Another significant part of my journey is that I noticed that there were a lot of vacant lots in Boston. Historically, they have been neglected spaces in the sense that there's illegal dumping, and one finds televisions and tires and used needles from the heroin market in Egleston Square. We did some initial research on this particular space in Egleston Square, which had been slated for affordable housing development, but 30 years had gone by and no one had built anything. At that time—around 2008, 2009—no one was building anything because the housing market had imploded. It didn't seem likely that anything was going to be happening anytime soon. So cleaning it up, making it a usable community space, bringing neighbors together and connecting across these urban divides, and then also addressing violence put a lot on our plate.
A young man was shot and killed the first year that we were out there cleaning up the space, and we didn't want a cycle of retaliation or ongoing violence. We wanted to be able to come together and mourn and grieve and move into a space of healing. This garden and the action of neighbors to build this food forest catalyzed that healing process by connecting people. The neighbors who were planting the food forest reached out to the family and friends of the young man who had been murdered and brought them soup and water and invited them to come and plant a blueberry bush and say some words of remembrance and then hung a temporary banner over the chain link fence where people wrote “Rest in Peace” and other messages. To this day, that altar gets created on the anniversary of his death at Egleston Community Orchard. It was very impactful, and people witnessed this, but people were also looking out their windows and witnessing the connection that happened and they started getting involved. One neighbor said, “We used to have a community parade every year to celebrate this neighborhood. I'm going to start it up again.” Morale-boosting ripple effects led to other initiatives in the neighborhood far beyond the food forest.
Then also the garden itself is healing. I don't think we know exactly the cause-and-effect relationship, but we know that flowers and trees reduce stress levels, and actually in urban planning circles it's known to reduce violence, we think because of the fact that it reduces stress and soothes people. So there's that public health benefit, which is well documented, about the role that flowers and trees play in urban neighborhoods.
I realized how beneficial food forests were at so many levels as I became more involved. For example, the Egleston Community Orchard is about 4,500 square feet, and in a small vacant urban lot, there are these holistic impacts. It captures rainwater, provides shade and mitigates the urban heat island effect and gives folks a cool place to sit in the deep heat of the summer. It mitigates our carbon emissions by bringing carbon into the plants, but also into the soil by repairing and regenerating the soil. There have been a lot of studies on how healthy soil may actually sequester even more carbon than trees.
So the presence of this food forest is doing a lot in a small space in addition to producing food. We teach people about the seasonality of fruits and vegetables, teach young kids about the nature that is around them, introduce them to raspberries growing on raspberry bushes and strawberries on strawberry plants and help them learn how to take care and tend that food, as well as how to harvest herbs and make tea or tinctures for medicinal purposes. Then perhaps most importantly, the food forest is bringing people together and building what I would call community resilience, because the community's ability to adapt to change or crisis is dependent on their relationships with each other. In a gentrifying neighborhood where people are in different social and professional circles that don't necessarily overlap but are geographically abutting each other, this food forest becomes a space where they actually connect and form relationships, and we have seen that again and again. So much is happening from one intervention leading to so much beneficial potential effects for humans and the earth. Boston is a big enough city that if we can do it here, it becomes possible to do it elsewhere. It becomes a beacon of hope.
Our partnership is also to help with funding, so let's take the example of the Edgewater Neighborhood Association in Mattapan. They identified an ∼10,000-square-foot lot that had been vacant for decades, and they said, “We want to build a food forest there.” They came to us and said, “You're the Boston Food Forest Coalition. Can you help us plan and design and build the food forest there?” We said, “Absolutely. That's what we're here for.” So we started to come to the Edgewater Neighborhood Association meetings. It was led by the neighborhood association, and the passion of those neighbors that made it all happen, and we connected them to experts, whether that's landscape professionals, design professionals, etc. We created an initial design for the space with the input of their priorities. We clarified with them our design principles, like how we use permaculture and ecological agriculture to think about the resources already on-site. In this case, there were walnut trees already growing, and the neighbors were excited about that because some of them had grown up in the South cracking black walnuts and eating them as children. In fact, they created a walnut-cracking station in their new food forest, to share that skill with neighbors, so that was incorporated into the design.
Simultaneously, the neighbors and we had a conversation with the City of Boston where the City identified that this lot was not suitable for commercial real estate development. So they agreed, yes, this would be a good community space, and then the City of Boston Department of Neighborhood Development has what they call the Grassroots Fund, which is ultimately part of a community development block grant program through the federal government. The federal government has Community Development Block Grant money that goes down to local municipalities, and then Boston has some of that and what they call the grassroots fund for local community gardens. When we identified this project with neighborhood support and the design, the city was able to put forward an initial funding award of about $125,000 to start phase one of the development process, and paid for things like leveling the land so that we could have Americans with Disabilities compliant pathways, and we could put in a new attractive fence with an arbor and a gateway and signage that welcomed people to the space, as well as buy the trees, build a covered platform gazebo space for people to be in, and put in benches so people could be comfortable in the garden and start to use it for community purposes. That initial phase one money historically has come from the City of Boston. However, if we are going to grow, we're going to need to find additional sources of funding as well.
The full potential is not going to be realized right away. But in the meanwhile, there is food that is harvested from our spaces, and there is great educational value as we teach people about the nutritional value of fresh fruit and vegetables. We remind people that these foods are not difficult to cook with or preserve and not difficult to grow or harvest, and having children involved in that from a young age is wonderful and a cultural shift. If one's budget is constrained and a person can't spend a lot of money on food, it's a lot cheaper to harvest the raspberries next door than it is to buy them from the supermarket, and the food will be fresh.
The stewardship leaders decide the programming on the space: what gets planted, what gets harvested, what cultural events happen, and how it gets distributed. In terms of distribution, there are different examples. Some have distributed the food door to door to neighbors in need who are struggling and deliver brown bags with food. Sometimes they take the food to food banks. Old West Church, for example, donates its food to the Women's Lunch Place, which is a shelter that feeds people. Sometimes we've partnered with other nonprofits. Ellington Food Forest has donated its food to Rounding The Bases, which is an eldercare nonprofit that teaches elderly people how to cook and preserve their food. Sometimes the food goes to churches, because the stewards are connected to churches. The critical thing to remember is that there is a lot of shelf-stable food available to families; however, fresh, healthy produce options are less available. In the world today, we grow more food than we consume, so it's really not a question of producing more food, it's a question of better distribution of the food we already produce. Food forests are very accessible places where people are producing fresh food with their neighbors, sharing recipes, and they meet their neighbors in the garden.
The Ellington neighbors talk a lot about food-as-medicine, and they have had an annual Food As Medicine harvest festival every year at the end of the season. They brought together the family health van and the neighborhood health clinic and face painting, and made a festival out of the event. Partly, that is their effort to combat diabetes and obesity, and other health challenges in their neighborhood. They also did workshops where they taught people about the medicinal qualities of herbs that can help with one's respiratory or digestive system. We demystify the process of working with food and herbs so that people see it is not so complicated to harvest mint leaves and brew in a kettle. In these ways, we are adding to the type of education that clinicians would want their clients to have regarding nutrition and health.
The creation of Food Forests is a growing movement, partly because people are responding to anxiety about the future. There's anxiety about our food system and how regional it is and about climate change and wanting to do something local that transforms that anxiety into action. There is a big food forest in Atlanta, GA, that just got a lot of publicity. There was the one in Seattle, WA that predates us. There are initiatives in Chicago, IL that are not exactly food forests but are similar. There is lots going on now in other parts of the country, and we have been approached by groups from Connecticut and throughout the greater Boston area, and we will begin offering tools to help these areas get started. In addition, as we work with volunteers, their questions are, “How do we socialize the knowledge? We are learning what is a healthy native perennial vs. a noxious invasive weed, but how do we have guidebooks and train other people in it?” So we're building those tool sets and creating a dashboard to help answer: How do you know your food forest is healthy and vibrant? We are building that dashboard with the stewards' participation, and then we're field-testing it, and maybe a year from now we will be able to share that with the world and say, “Here are some tools we've created for your food forest that could support you in your neighborhood to do some more initiatives.”
To Contact Orion Kriegman
Orion Kriegman, MPP
Executive Director, Founding Member
Boston Food Forest Coalition
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Website: