Planting the Seeds of a Food Forest in Philadelphia

With its myriad public gardens and 40,000-plus vacant lots, many of which have been transformed into community farms, Philadelphia is already a hub for community gardening. Philly also has a shortage of supermarkets in low income neighborhoods, which has made the city an incubator for novel ideas on getting healthy food into people’s hands, cheap or even free. Now, a group of Philadelphia agriculturists are proposing a new type of garden that could address the latter by taking advantage of the former: a food forest on public land, modeled after a similar project in Seattle.

A food forest is a permaculture, or self-sufficient, gardening technique that mimics a woodland ecosystem, and they’re popping up in cities all over the United States. Rather than neat rows of annual crops that need to be dug up and replanted each spring, a food forest has layers of mostly perennial edible and medicinal plants. There may be a canopy of fruit trees, below that shrubs like blueberries, then herbs like rosemary, ground-cover crops like clover, as well as vining plants and root vegetables like potatoes. They tend to promote native plants and provide education about sustainable agriculture, beneficial insects, and local foraging.

And unlike at many community gardens, a food forest has an open door policy. “Anyone can come at any time of day and take whatever they want,” says Michael Muehlbauer, the agricultural engineer and orchardist behind the Fair Amount Food Forest proposal. Whatever doesn’t get eaten by the community is harvested and donated.

More