Permaculture in the ‘hood: planting a food forest in Calgary

This Saturday I had the privilege of checking out the progress and end result of the planting of a food forest in Calgary on the invitation of Rob Avis, a local permaculture practitioner. It was a class project, essentially. A good handful of people in Rob’s Introduction to Permaculture course met up to tear up half of one student’s front yard to shape it into a nourishment providing patch of food-bearing plants.

I met Rob a while back at a Calgary Food Policy Council meeting. He’s a trained permaculture designer with a background in mechanical engineering who has spent a good amount of time abroad and at home grappling with sustainability issues from a design perspective. Mike Soron and I both attended an amazing permaculture “convergence” earlier this year lead by Rob that also featured Ron Berezan, the Urban Farmer. That event had revelatory potential, making it clear that much of our ecological issues could be addressed with good systems design that mimics the workings of nature. However, I had yet to see the process in action in person, despite convincing videos off of YouTube.

The forest site was only a few blocks away from where my wife and I live in north-west Calgary. While it’s a neighborhood close to the University with plenty of young, idealistic folks and academics, the area doesn’t have much of a reputation for ecological innovation. Built at the beginning of North America’s sprawl outward in the 1950’s, the cluster of neighborhoods that may have been built on the grid was still centered on the single family home that grew a nice bumper crop of grass every year. It’s nice to see progress to which you can actually walk.

When I got there, Rob and his students were finishing covering the old lawn with cardboard and using gravel to fill in a ditch they had built that ran from the house down to the lawn. The cardboard, I assumed, was there to assist in the decomposition of the original grass, and preventing roots, weeds and the grass from popping up. Underneath the cardboard was a layer of straw on top of a layer of soil for the same purpose. I asked Rob what the plan was and he explained that the ditch was meant to act as a swale, which would keep the soil underneath the forest hydrated. The spout from the eaves trough on the house ran a hose at a contour downhill from the house to the edge of the yard before the sidewalk. The hose was permeated to allow water to seep out into the soil. Then, they covered the hose with gravel to keep it in place and allow extended flow.

I could feel plenty of energy from the folks involved. They were implementing the class, a kind of a practicum that allowed them to actually practice what was preached. It’s all part of Rob’s philosophy, which seems to be to plant a seed, let it grow and those seeds will spread on their own. “I charge too much money to do this for someone,” Rob tells me, “and when they want it I can’t really say no. I’d much rather show people how to do it and have them do their own.” It’s all about creating a community of individuals in our own space to take these issues head on and do something about it.

When I came back later that afternoon, the whole process was complete. They had planted their trees and covered the cardboard with woodchips for mulch. Plants varied from Saskatoon to apple to pear to plum. The front yard was transformed, leaving me somewhat jealous–my rental, with the dead grass out front, the dead tree and weekly (dis)pleasure of mowing with an old gas mower.

Barry and Fiona Clement, who actually own the yard that was completely transformed seemed very excited about the process and the end product, which was really quite astounding. Barry is an engineer and saw the course advertised at Clean Calgary and thought it would be a great way to get his feet wet in urban sustainable design. It was also the perfect opportunity as a new home owner (and Dad) to beautify his front yard and (bringing out the engineer in him) making it an efficient food producing unit. Seeing as how sustainable design is an observed process, Barry also sees it as a long term project with plenty of tweaking along the way. No system is exactly the same, so only time will tell if the peculiar ecology of Barry and Fiona’s back yard is running as they intended.

To cap off the experience, Rob told me the whole class was headed off to see Food Inc. that evening. I thought you were supposed to see the movie, become terrified, then dig up your backyard–not the other way around! I guess we’re further along in Calgary than I thought and we already have some convinced and committed individuals who are getting the ball rolling.

A special thanks to Rob Avis for the opportunity to view this remarkable project and sharing his photos, and to Barry Clement for his comments after the fact.

Tagged as: food forest, geoff lawton, permaculture, ravis sustainable, rob avis, self-reliance, swales, systems design