Nuts About Food Forests in Wallingford
I just watched a very sweet and informative video about planting fruit and nut trees made by folks in the tiny town of Totnes, UK (pop. 7,000). Totnes is famous for being both the birthplace of the International Transition movement, and for being the community that branded itself as ‘The Nut Tree Capital of Britain.’
Nut trees are an integral part of a resilient local urban food system. Nuts (chestnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, and walnuts), which all grow now in our climate, produce far more protein, fiber, and fat than similarly sized areas of arable crops such as wheat. Nut trees are also an essential element of urban food forests, a permaculture concept that employs nature to restore the earth while providing better human habitat.
In Wallingford, we’ve been concentrating on caring for our flourishing street tree forest. In the past 20 years, under the able Tree Stewardship of Nancy Merrill, Wallingford neighbors have planted thousands of street trees on their planting strips through a program called “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood Tree Planting Project.”
Under current City of Seattle codes, we are not supposed to plant fruit and nut trees in the planting strip but it may be time for us to adapt the code to fit the growing interest in growing edibles and concentrate on planting trees that bear nuts, fruits, and produce timber, including some of the species recommended by Transition thinkers.
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.
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Unfortunately, that link to “species recommended by Transition thinkers” leads to a 404 error. I wanna see the list!
Hi Wendy, I’ll check the links in this article. Try this link in the meantime. http://greenwallingford.ning.com/forum/topics/community-kitchens-and-food
Hi Wendy and Cathy,
I’ve updated the link so it redirects to the list of recommended tree species!
Cheers,
Ashley
Hi Cathy, I’m really enjoying reading your posts on here, thank you for posting! I love the idea of integrating edible hedgerows and food forests throughout our city, what a great way to integrate local food into our everyday lives.
There is a wonderful example of an edible hedgerow on 105th N Seattle, you probably know of it, by Nathan Hale Highschool, it has a lot of the common permaculture plants in it and is a great example of what can be done. It is loaded with food every summer, I would love to see more of this around town!
Thanks!
I encourage everyone who loves fruit and nut trees to learn how to care for them. We have an incredible inventory of mature fruit and nut trees in Seattle that are begging to be rescued from blackberries and ivy and cared back to productive health.
Check out the City Fruit web site: http://www.cityfruit.org for classes and good information about taking care of your and your neighbors’ fruit trees.
Hi Cathy,
Turns out we CAN plant fruit and nut trees in our planting strips. The only fruit trees prohibited are ones that might drop “dangerous” fruit on to folks walking by on the sidewalk. Check out this SDOT blog post, with links to the approved fruit trees. http://sdotblog.seattle.gov/2009/10/27/what-a-lovely-planting-strip/
-Elaine