The Beacon Hill Food Forest provides publicly accessible produce in a city park
When the weather is nice, Seattle’s Jefferson Park comes alive with people of all stripes coming to take advantage of the opportunity to soak up a little sun. On April 21, games of Ultimate Frisbee were underway on the flat plateau of the park as bicyclists and walkers took advantage of the new paved path that skirts around the perimeter where Joshua Furman was foraging for herbs.
Gleaning herbs out of a public park might seem like a health hazard, but the lovage and chervil Furman snipped are there for the taking and fresher than what you’d get from a farmers market.
In 2013, a group of community-minded agriculturalists opened the Beacon Hill Food Forest on the slanting western edge of the park.
The space interweaves communal growing spaces populated with carefully planned permaculture with smaller personal gardens and a plot called the Giving Garden that provides fresh vegetables for the local food bank.
Volunteers tend the communal spaces on their own time and in monthly work parties that include lunch and a chance to get down and dirty in the amended soil. The result is a cornucopia of fruit-bearing trees, berry plants, vegetables and herbs that anyone can come and sample.
The forest is a mix of the familiar and exotic, with pear trees next to butternut trees planted in soil carpeted with the green leaves and white flowers of strawberry plants. A helix studded with leafy greens curves gently around a walking path, creating a living border to the planted space.
The only rule is respect, said Glenn Herlihy, who cofounded the Food Forest in 2009.
“That’s respect for the plant — use two hands and don’t yank it off and break the branch — and respect for the community by not taking it all,” Herlihy said. “These are old foraging rules of survival, and we’re reintroducing them to urban culture.”
Herlihy knew he and cofounder Jacqueline Cramer had something special on their hands when they announced the project in 2010 and 120 people arrived to give their two cents.
Six years later, the Food Forest remains a forward-thinking experiment in the alternative use of public land, and it’s growing.
The Food Forest team is in the process of planning an expansion that will build on ideas incorporated in the original design by cultivating a designated wetland and planting it with edible, albeit less familiar, crops.
“It will be a lot more unrecognizable,” Herlihy said. “We’ll use tubers and small berry bushes that a lot of people don’t know.”
In the future, the project could expand along the north side of the park, taking over the empty grassland that exists there now.
That is easier said than done.
The soil underneath the grass is mostly clay and couldn’t support productive, useful plants, said Peter Donahue, a volunteer with the garden and resident compost expert.
Donahue, an electrician by trade, has his own P-Patch in Judkins Park where he coordinated compost, a mix of decomposing organics that’s rich in nutrients and helpful in resuscitating poor-quality soil.
He got tapped as an outside consultant to help out with the Food Forest’s compost program a year ago.
“I came to help for a day and the next thing you know …,” Donahue said, spreading his hands in a gesture of mock defeat.
The beauty of the garden is the mix of people that it brings together, he said. A large information panel in the middle of the food forest is translated into five languages for the benefit of the diverse Beacon Hill community. Electricians and software engineers work next to ethno-botanists and experienced beekeepers to grow food both for themselves and for their neighbors.
The Giving Garden at Beacon Hill Food Forest supplied 1,100 pounds of produce to the El Centro de la Raza Food Bank in 2015.
The entire program of P-Patches, Giving Gardens and community farms donated more than 61,000 pounds of food over the course of the year.
“It’s meant to be accessible to all kinds of different people,” Donahue said. “The park is a public space, and we all have to learn to get along.”
For more information about volunteering with the Food Forest, visit beaconfoodforest.org.