Growing Food for Everyone--A Great Idea, in Seattle, in England, and--in Price Hill?

I read recently that the city of Seattle is planning to establish a city park full of edible plants in a working-class neighborhood called Beacon Hill. It’s a project that was designed as a final assignment for a permaculture design class back in 2009, and it is supposed to have some food ready for harvesting this year.

The plan is to grow fruit, mostly—apples, pears, plums, grapes, blueberries, and raspberries, free for the taking for anyone who needs or wants it—a food forest in the city. That sounds a lot like what is happening with the perennial fruit and nut trees around the Terry Street Garden, although I’m not sure the Enright CSA wants just anyone to come pick the fruit yet. We already have to share it with the deer, after all.

The folks in Seattle are apparently concerned that some people may take more than their fair share of the fruit, but I have also read about a similar experiment in a village in Yorkshire, England, where the result has been a fairly equitable sharing of the bounty. In that town, called Todmorden, they have planted food in every available space, from the parking lot surrounds to the flower beds in front of the police station to the towpath on the canal that runs through town. People take what they can use, and no one—so far—has been too greedy. Everyone is so happy with the situation that they are working on expanding the crops to become totally self-sufficient (at least with regard to their food) by 2018.

“We are gentle revolutionaries,” one of the founders of the Todmorden project was quoted as saying. “Everything we do is underpinned with kindness.” What a nice sentiment, and one I hope prevails in Seattle’s Beacon Food Forest, too. To read more about the Food Forest, visit their website, and to read about the experiment in Todmorden, England, go to this article from the Daily Mail.