Oliver Middle School Food Forest
Oliver Middle School Food Forest
This 8000 sq ft food forest was collaboratively designed with Ms. Maltese’s 7th grade environmental club to create the first large-scale food forest at a public school in Oregon. This forest garden will provide decades of environmental education opportunities for the students as well as large quantities of fresh organic food for students and their families.
The environmental club prepared the site by covering the grass with contractor paper and many loads of wood chips delivered by local arborists. With help from Ms. Maltese and a couple of volunteers we laid out the design with stakes and cotton twine. The next week students went on a field trip to One Green World and Portland Nursery to bring plants back to the planting site and we arranged them according to the design. Planting of trees, shrubs, and some herbaceous plants followed the next day involving 5 sixth grade science classes, the environmental club students, and a handful of volunteers and parents.
Planting will continue and this site will serve as an educational resource for decades as well as a model for what is possible at public schools in Portland and beyond!
This planting’s canopy layer tree guilds include persimmon, mulberry, medlar, cherry, cornelian cherry, peach, plum, apple, fig, pawpaw, jujube, and more.
The shrub layer includes blueberries, bush cherries, currants, gooseberries, jostaberry, honeyberry, columnar apple, goji, elderberry, raspberry, blackberry, and asparagus.
The groundcover consists of 5 different cultivars of strawberry with sweet potato and squash growing during the summer.
Nitrogen Fixers include perennials seaberry, goumi, and lupine with fava, pole and bush beans, peanuts, and snap peas during the summer.
The herbaceous Layer includes comfrey, buckwheat, phacelia, mugwort, selfheal, stridolo, purple mountain spinach, parsley, artichoke, tree collards, sea kale, herbs, medicinals, and a variety of pollinator-supporting flowers.
The vine layer includes grapes, passionflower, schisandra vine, and fuzzy kiwi.
The root and mycelial layers include garlic, daikon radish, potatoes, onions, ginger, yacon, and winecap mushrooms
