Urban Food Forests Provide Space for Community Connection, Education and Nourishment
The Sheridan Food Forest sits alongside Big Goose Creek, tucked into what was once a BMX Park in the community of Sheridan, Wyoming. The once weedy, hard packed lot is now filled with plants and trees native to Wyoming, and supplemented with fruit trees and common vegetables. The food forest seeks to provide food to anyone in the community who is willing to forage for it. Carol LeResche found inspiration for this community-run project after visiting the Beacon Hill Food Forest in Seattle which has sparked 70 other Food Forests across the United States as of 2018. “ I saw what they were doing at Beacon Hill and thought that could work really well here in Sheridan. So I gathered a group of people together, most of them are Powder River members and started a committee,” explained Carol. Powder River Basin Resource Council is also a fiscal sponsor of the Sheridan Food Forest.
As a child, Carol would follow in her father’s footsteps through their family garden, snacking on freshly picked peas along the way. Today, she facilitates the volunteers in the Food Forest and coordinates forest projects for grade school student groups from nearby schools, passing on the knowledge from her father, her own organic gardening background, and her research of Wyoming’s wildscapes. “Kids are really very curious about stuff. They want to taste things and they want to learn about things. And they learn very well by doing,” said Carol.
The difference between a food forest and a community garden is that you won’t see plots in a food forest; no section of the food forest belongs to just one individual. The entire forest is available to anyone in the community, whether they are a volunteer that helped plant the food or a passerby needing some asparagus or garlic, to supplement their dinner that night. Food Forests have the ability to increase biodiversity, offer erosion control, provide food and shelter for pollinators and other wildlife, and serve as a gathering spot for community events as well as having the potential to improve community health.
“I want to fill this up with food, and have pathways through the food instead of having all of this grass,” explained Carol.“I really want it to be full of food for people. And, of course, the things that feed the bees, and have it be healthy, and a haven because we get a lot of birds in here that eat the fruit as well.” In addition to fruits and vegetables for people to forage for, the forest also has a pollinator garden that the volunteers run a census on each year to track what pollinators are visiting the food forest and how the garden can adapt to include different plants that help pollinators thrive.
Once Carol got the idea for the Food Forest, her community ties and engagement helped her put a committee and the project into full motion. “Carol is great at motivating people to come together and help out,” remarked one of the Forest volunteers. Calling her contacts to recruit community members to help with various projects over the years is largely how she has established the workforce that keeps the food forest free of invasive weeds and blooming each year. “I think they like working outside. I think they like the idea. Many volunteers were part of the originating committee and they'd like to see it through. It's nice to come here, even though it's hard work,” said Carol.
The Food Forest plot of land was an abandoned BMX park right before the Park District and the City of Sheridan allowed the food forest committee to plant bushes, trees and other perennials in that space. The committee asked that a member of the Sheridan Recreation District, Chuck Walters, join the originating committee. The committee then created an informational pamphlet for the Forest. Chuck believed in the ideas and talked with the sport groups involved with adjoining Thorne Rider Park and was an integral part of winning the city’s approval of the Food Forest.
Carol initially overheard on the radio station that an old BMX park in Sheridan was needing a new use. The park had been causing erosion into Big Goose Creek and had to be deconstructed. The food forest committee secured a Specialty Crop grant from the Wyoming Agriculture Department. The trees that were bought with that money in 2016 are now bearing apples and pears as the forest continues to grow and the soil begins to improve.
Once the land was made available to the Food Forest, Carol connected with the organization, Rooted in Wyoming for a 50/50 shared grant through the Wyoming State Forestry Division. Located in Sheridan, this organization helps schools develop gardens for kids to learn about gardening. The Food Forest’s role for the grant this year was to create a hugelkultur demonstration plot. Hugelkultur is a German word meaning hill culture. It is a horticultural technique where a mound is constructed from decaying wood debris and other compostable biomass plant materials and then covered in soil. This technique mimics how food grows naturally in a forest. As the wood decays, it replenishes the soil and the wood underneath also retains water making for a more sustainable gardening technique. Volunteers came out to learn about the process and then built the hugelkultur mound. Now it’s used as an example for others to learn about the method.
The previous year, the Food Forest created an educational plot along a section of fence called the Wyoming Thicket, that includes chokecherries and other native plants that locals see naturally growing in the draws and along roadways. The food forest also mimics how plants and trees grow naturally in the forest where there is little understory. Understory is the base layer of vegetation that grows underneath the main canopy in a forest. Volunteers removed any grass and understory because eventually, these plants will grow so thick that these grasses and small plants won’t grow back which is what happens naturally in the forest. “So we do things like that, that people can relate to when they walk through here and they can say ‘Oh, yeah, I know what this is. I see it when I go out in the spring all the time,’” explained Carol.
Future projects include installing educational signs with QR codes for visitors to learn about the plants for a walking tour of the forest and a forager hunt project for children which is part of a community event called Picnic on the Pathway. “I think it's an eye-opening experience and I think it brings kids closer to nature to learn about these things,” said Carol.
Foraging for food has the power to bring people closer to their food source and to their community. “Pick it, take it home, eat it. Know what you've got here. So you can set a season for your food. It’s just kind of fun. I love foraging. I like to go out and look for stuff to eat,” said Carol.
Beyond strengthening community ties and our connection to food and nature, Food Forests may have the potential to address food insecurity in communities. However, the Food Forest concept is still very early in its development and there hasn’t been a lot of research on whether or not this model can help address lack of access to fresh food and food insecurity but there have been studies that show their potential. One study revealed that 222 acres of food forest plots could provide the entire city of Burlington, VT with the recommended daily fruit intake.“Ours isn’t there yet (to address food insecurity), but imagine how many people could care for themselves if there were food forests in all of these little community pockets,” said Carol.