Urban Food Forest Project Launch!

New Leaf Foods, Inc. is launching an Urban Food Forest project during our annual New Leaf Garden Blitz event on May 12 thru the 15th. You can start your own food forest in your yard today. Order your fruit and nut trees and bushes on our site here!  

Food forests are plantings of edible landscape plants like raspberries, blackberries, elderberries, plum trees, apple trees, currants, and hazelnuts that not only enhance the beauty of any yard, but they also provide growers with yummy, healthy options that grow year after year. Inspiring people to grow food in their yard is good for your health, the health of our community and the health of the planet. Integrating urban agriculture into neighborhoods and communities and emphasizing perennials like fruit and nut trees and berry bushes helps improve access to fresh, local produce, helps preserve biodiversity and reduces the energy required to grow and distribute food. Food forests are part of the broader food justice and urban agriculture movement.   

As Mark Bittman writes in his book, Animal, Vegetable, Junk, urban gardens, farms and food forests “can’t compare in scale, appearance, or yield to large rural farms but by supplying populations with real food, and bringing power and understanding of food systems to urban eaters, they become important pieces of the puzzle.”  

Traditional farms, community gardens and orchards tend to grow food completely or mostly at the same plane, but food forests involve an ecological design that mimics how plants naturally grow on multiple layers within a forest. 

 Each community's definition of a food forest is a little different. Urban Food forests are a form of permaculture., or a system of regenerating agriculture. Farms, community gardens and orchards tend to grow food completely or mostly at the same plane, but food forests involve an ecological design that mimics how plants naturally grow on multiple layers within a forest. They incorporate stacked layers of edible plants with as many as seven layers: ground-hugging plants, such as strawberries; vines; and roots, an herbaceous layer that includes herbs and non-woody plants such as vegetables; shorter fruit and nut trees; tall fruit and nut trees serving as a canopy. From the ground up, the edibles might include beets, strawberries, grapes, basil, blueberries, fruit and nut trees.    

We look forward to adding fruit and nut bushes and trees to our New Leaf Garden Blitz project and begin building an Urban food forest in yards all over Greater Green Bay.