Food Forest Virtual Tour
FGCU Food Forest Virtual Tour
8 April 2020
Food Forest History
The idea to build this 1/2 acre self sustaining garden on FGCU's campus was brought to the Florida state senator, Kolve Byrd at the time, on March 22nd, 2011. The bill was passed on March 29th, although after much debate, and now 9 years later it holds hundreds of native tropical plants and fruits and vegetables that students can see the biodiversity they add to the area as well as pick and take home some of the edible foods to eat and cook. No time was wasted to get this literal earth moving movement into action and construction because the students who got this idea together knew how beneficial it would be to not only the campus, but the area! The initial phase of the Food Forest began on April 22nd and was completed on September 18th with the help of the student body that contributed over 1275 service learning hours from March-August! Today it is now managed by the Food Forest Advisory Council and according to their website it is "a team of students, faculty, staff, and community members who are dedicated to the success of the project."
Screenshot of an image from the Food Forest's website
Values and Principles of the Food Forest
The Food Forest was the brilliant brain food idea of a group of forward thinking student government students that wanted to share and teach the practices of permaculture, educate students and the community on how to grow and care for plants, and to bring a new aspect to the FGCU campus. They wanted to show people the unique opportunity we have right in our backyards here in southwest Florida, with our year round warm climate that allows tropical plants to flourish! Already in Florida there is a lot of land used for agriculture, so the mission of our Food Forest was to show people that plants do grow in a natural environment without the use of fertilizers and pesticides, they just need to be suited to that environment. For instance, the grasses that surround Florida homes and golf courses are maintained unnaturally because when they go through their natural cycles of brown in dry season and green in the wet season, people don't like the brown phase so they treat their grass with unnecessary amounts of fertilizers to keep it green year round. Misconceptions like this are one of the things the Food Forest wants to shine a light on as well as the wealth of foods that can be grown without the need for fertilizers or pesticides and how they add to the biodiversity and health of the landscape, rather than taking away from it!
Image was taken from the internet. I have full confidence they only use natural
pest controllers in the Food Forest. NO fertilizers, NO GMO's, and NO pesticides.
Food Forest Makeup
According to the gentleman (John) who did the blog post tour through the Food Forest, he identified numerous edible and nonedible plants that they grow and the benefits associated to us if we ingest them. Here are a few that he talked about and other benefits they provide:
- Moringa: A leafy tree with tall shoots and small leaf clusters, said to have more nutritional value than kale and is a good source of vitamins and minerals. John said it could be eaten raw, but it is most common in a powder form that serves as a supplement and can be added to other meals. In the video it was also a very nice looking tree, so i'm sure it would add some curb appeal to yards.
- Thai Pepper Plant: The leaves can be eaten straight and John said they had anti-cancer and anti-disease properties, however I don't know how much validity that has because I could find no benefits for them on the internet. The peppers they grow are edible, but care in handling is advised as they could be an irritant on the skin if you touch your face. They are a good ornamental plant as well that can be placed along the border of a garden.
- Beautyberry: This is an all around great plant! The roots, leaves, and branches were used by many Native American tribes for healing ailments such as fevers, dizziness and stomachaches. Later on in history the leaves were found to be natural bug repellents when crushed up and rubbed on the skin. The berries and leaves are not only edible for humans but numerous species of birds that rely on the berries! This plant is also beautiful too look at and adds to curb appeal.
This is a picture of Beautyberry that I took in The Florida Aquariums
Wetland Exhibit for a project I did during one of my internships.
- Jamaican Strawberry Tree: This tree produces small cherry sized fruits that are edible and are rich in antioxidants, vitamin C, calcium and phosphorus. The fruits have a very sweet flavor, described by some as being as sweet as cotton candy. The tree also produces small white flowers that bring in bees to pollinate the tree and provide them with food. It can grow to be very tall, so it may be difficult to manage and may not add much curb appeal, but if the grower wants access to a power packet sweet fruit then they would want to grow this plant because the blogger guy was just at a loss for words raving about it haha.
** I realized at the end of writing this that their website had a whole list of the plants they grow and oddly enough the ones he identified and I chose to write about were not even on their list, only beautyberry was.
How the Food Forest is Sustainable
The biggest issue with industrial food production is the stripping of nutrients from the overuse of the soil, thus why they use large amounts of fertilizers that in turn end up poisoning the land they are so dependent upon. They are reliant on producing abundant and good quality yields month after month, year after year while not changing the type of product they grow. What they are "trying" to achieve is the basis of sustainability; "the quality of not being harmful to the environment or depleting natural resources, and thereby supporting long-term ecological balance." But the mark they are missing, the mark the Food Forest was built around, is the long term ecological balance of food production. The Food Forest was designed with intentionality and built to withstand our Florida weather events. I noticed in the guys video that there was an information board at the entrance and a little seating area to be able to talk to groups of people. If I had ever taken the initiative to visit the forest, which I am really regretting never doing, I would have learned the sustainable initiatives used to ensure that these plants grow under natural circumstances, are not treated with chemicals, and are not depleting the nutrients in that microhabitat but adding to it and bringing back the animals and insects that rely on these plants as a food source as well.
How the permaculture design of the Food Forest could be applied to the numerous agriculture fields in SWFL
If we are to have a future in providing crop yields for our ever growing world, our only hope is to incorporate permaculture practices in order to ensure that we will have viable soil and land to use hundreds of years from now. After all, the word permaculture is the combination of the words permanent and agriculture.
So, what can commercial agriculture incorporate from permaculture practices:
- Having a closed loop system where the farmers are turning waste into resources that can be used as livestock feed or nutrient sources for their crops rather than shipping in food for the animals and fertilizers for the plants
- Incorporation of agroforestry initiatives by growing trees alongside crops and livestock areas in agricultural settings
- Not having monocultures, but integrating different crops with each other and changing the primary crop with each growing season, which helps to naturally keep nutrients in the soil and their water demand, as some crops require fewer amounts of water
- Having the system sustain itself through the intentional design and ensuring that multiple processes are at work and each fulfilling their own function
- The final point is one that John, who did the blog video, talked about that the land in the Food Forest is sloped as to funnel the water down to concentrate around plants that require more water than those planted in the higher elevated and dry land.
Reference (and a very good article): https://modernfarmer.com/2016/04/permaculture/
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