I have been nominated as a CBC Champion of Change.
The program celebrates Canadian volunteers, with over $100,000 going to the winners’ charities. I’ll keep you posted, as this could be great for Community Forests International.
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Preparing for a New Season at the Garden
Each year Sackville Community Garden is prepped for a new season of planting and a few hands certainly make the work easier for garden managers. Early this week Lorelei Harrison’s grade 8 class from Marshview Middle School got their hands dirty with Community Forests International and helped to remove the remains of the fall harvest. Pulling out organic debris such as roots, leaves, weeds and the odd unclaimed vegetable the students were able to successfully clear out and prepare several beds for future plot owners. The beds were raked and the soil was covered with a healthy layer of eel grass (Zostera sp.), an abundant marine angiosperm that washes ashore after fall storms forming mats of decaying brown vegetation. Rain showers that follow help to remove the salt from the eel grass, which can then be collected and used on garden beds. Students helped to pile eel grass on weeded beds that will help prevent erosion, reduce future weed establishment and slowly release fertilizers and nutrients into the soil.
The class was also fortunate to meet Community Forests Pemba Director, Mbarouk Moussa Omar, who spoke with them about climate change and the impacts which presently threaten his island off the coast of Tanzania in the Indian Ocean. They discussed issues of soil erosion and nutrient depletion, identified how green spaces and tree planting can help to absorb atmospheric carbon and how growing food locally helps to reduces transportation fuel costs and buffers the negative impacts of price hikes in food sources due to failing crops and increasing oil prices.
Connecting students to food, allowing them to discover how and where it comes from is an important aspect of CFI’s educational outreach. Often, the garden is the first place where students will learn what a broccoli plant looks like, how potatoes grow and that sunflowers seeds can be eaten directly off a drooping head. Overall, the garden is an engaging space where students can touch, feel, see and smell what is growing and learn to understand the diversity and complexity of even a simple garden ecosystem. It has also been found to be a useful venue for discussing broader topics and allows both young and old to engage themselves locally while thinking about global issues.
CFI would be happy to enhance their educational outreach at the Sackville Community Garden. If you are interested in having your class visit and assist with the garden feel free to contact us ( 506-536-3738) to arrange a visit.
Glooskap Centre Acadian Food Forest Garden
A couple weeks ago CFI staff attended a work party at the Glooskap Heritage Centre in Truro Nova Scotia and assisted with the final landscaping and planting stage of the centre’s new forest garden, which wraps nearly 360 degrees around the perimeter of the building. For the past four months the centre has been hard at work developing a multi-functional forest garden predominately planted with native species many of which include edible and medicinal plants used by the Mi’kmaq people. The garden will serve both the local Millbrook First National residents as well as visitors to the centre. It is their vision that this garden will offer new learning experiences to centre’s visitors including opportunities to learn both the ecological importance, nutritional benefits and spiritual aspects of native forbs, shrubs and trees of Eastern North America.
The garden provides a unique space for relaxation, outdoor learning and story telling due to the integration of meandering paths, a large gazebo with hay bail seating and several wooden sculptures into the design. Ideas such as contouring and mulching to create an uneven landscape and split rail fencing made of speckled alder and yellow birch branches to hide the buildings utility boxes were integrated in effort to retain the organic synchronisity. In between the paths are patches of food forests, wild medicinals, sacred plants and mixed deciduous acadian woodland totalling more than 100 native species gathered from local meadow and forest edge ecosystems and purchased from nurseries with assistance from a grant from the national charity Evergreen.
Traditional medicinal plants incorporated into the garden include yarrow (Achillea millefolium), dandilion (Taraxacum officinale), sweet flag (Acorus calamus), colts foot (Tussilago farfara), cow parsnip (Heracleum maximum) and bog labrador tea (Rhododendron groendlandicum). To emulate mixed deciduous Acadian forest the garden patches were planted with sugar maple (Acer saccharum), yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis), paper birch (Betula papyrifera), white spruce (Picea glauca), eastern white pine (Pinus strobus), witch hazel (Hamemelis sp.), butternut (Juglans cinerea), serviceberry (Amelanchier canadensis). Bayberry (Myrica sp.) was mixed in among patches due to the shurbs nitrogen fixing abilities . Other edibles featured in the garden included Ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris) for fiddleheads, Chokeberry (Aronia), Elderberry (Sambucus canadensis), Blueberry (Vaccinium ovalifolium), Beaked hazelnut (Corylus cornuta), river grape (Vitis riparia) and pearly everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea).
The garden’s designer Jayme Melrose has worked tirelessly all summer to create a truly unique space that will surely enhance visitors knowledge of the beauty and bounty of plants that can be found and grown in Eastern Canadian gardens. When asked what was her favourite aspect or experience associated with this project, Jayme identified that the ethnobotanical stories of people’s connections with plants and how they were used to heal, feed or how they were simply enjoyed were the most interesting and enlightening aspect of the project. The traditional knowledge that was shared and will be shared with this garden will surely foster and inspire amateur botanists, ecologists, farmers and gardeners for years to come.
© 2011 Community Forests International. All Rights Reserved. Contact CFI at (506) 536-3738 or info@forestsinternational.org