Growing Food Forests in Seattle

In planning the new Transition Seattle movement, which considers the need to grow more food locally in preparation for post-peak oil agriculture, I’ve been thinking about the potential for food forests in Seattle. Both food forests and the Transition movement are based on permaculture principles. Permaculture is a system of designing human settlements and horticulture in order to restore nature and provide better human habitat. Here in our region indigenous people managed forests to provide nuts, habitat, and forest products long before the land was settled by Europeans.

Today we’ve got robust tree planting and maintenance programs supported by various City of Seattle departments such as Parks, City Light, and the Department of Neighborhoods, but trees that produce fruit or nuts, or trees that are intended for harvest are not part of the City’s tree programs. The Department of Neighborhoods Tree Fund, which offers local residents fruit trees for their backyard if they plant ornamental street trees, strongly discourages food-bearing trees be planted on City-owned property–including planting strips.

Now that we are gleaning fruit with City Fruit, celebrating the Year of Urban Agriculture and actively building a resilient local food system, it might be a good idea to take a fresh look at revising our public land use ordinances to allow the planting of food bearing street trees.

In the Transition Handbook, Martin Crawford of the Agroforestry Research Trust provides a list of, “ten trees we can expect to see more of in a post-peak oil agriculture.”  These species might be interesting to consider as we cultivate food forests in our neighborhoods. The trees Mr. Crawford listed are adapted to UK climates, which are similar to ours in Seattle. Many of these species are ideal in urban hedgerows too:

Sweet chestnut – coppiced to produce fence posts (do not need preservatives). Also for nuts (can yield 3 to 4 tonnes per hectare) which are nutritionally comparable to rice. In the past whole societies have depended on chestnuts as their carbohydrate staple.

Apple – perhaps using varieties from more southern regions as climate warms locally

Bamboo – easy to grow and used for almost everything – food, construction

Plum – easy to grow and very productive

Downy oak – widely used in French forestry. Excellent quality timber. Drought resistant.

Walnut – high-quality timber (to replace cheap tropical sources) and nuts.

Alder – some of the best nitrogen-fixing trees for our climate. Fantastic windbreaks.

Pine – good-quality timber. Also, some important products currently made from oil could be made from pine resin instead. Turpentine. Some edible pine nuts too.

Willow – coppiced for fuel and windbreaks.

Lime (Tilia) – very useful. Many uses, including using coppiced logs for growing mushrooms. Edible young leaves for salads (which I can personally attest to being delicious).

About the author: Cathy Tuttle is part of Transition Seattle. Transition Seattle has a goal of creating 20-year plans that begin with a realistic vision of equitable natural resource use, energy descent, carbon neutrality, and economic constraints while networking people interested in resilient cities, including local urban food systems.

Related posts:

1. Nuts About Food Forests in Wallingford
2. Free Trees for South Seattle Residents
3. City Fruit Stitches Together the Fabric of an Urban Orchard

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