Veteran planting idea of 'Edible Forests' in Utica

Imagine going up the chair lift at Val Bialas Ski Center in Utica to a natural garden where visitors can forage, wildlife can flourish and the plants keep the ecosystem healthy.

"You can imagine picking golden raspberries and elderberry and rare walnut varieties and chestnuts and currants and gooseberries and etc., with the rest of the members of the community where others will converse and share ideas and recipes," said Joseph Pizzo, founder and president of the veteran-run nonprofit White Lion Farms Foundation, which envisions such gardens, both large and small, tucked into parks, backyards and school grounds all over the city.

Such a garden would be perfect, too, he said, in the South Woods switchbacks where some of the city's refugee population already goes to forage.

Pizzo, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, has planted the first seeds toward making that vision a reality in a demonstration garden in West Utica; the garden is a project of the foundation.

The Veterans' Edible Forest Garden grows plants in a way that mimics the way the ecosystem would look without human interference. Like the edge of a forest, it features an herbaceous border at the edge, then a layer of shrubs, then the forest's sub-canopy and finally, the canopy with vines growing over it. But Pizzo has substituted useful plants into this natural structure, creating a garden that benefits people, wildlife and ecological systems.

"There's plenty of opportunity," he said, "to do this anywhere and everywhere."

Throughout history, humans have relied on technology and survived by fighting nature, he said. He thinks it's time for a reboot.

"OK, we did, we survived," he said. "Now let's thrive."

Pizzo's method of gardening, which he doesn't like to label, includes principles of agricultural movements, such as permaculture and restorative agriculture, that are gaining traction around the world and, to a lesser extent, the United States. But Pizzo thinks these gardens can make a big difference in local communities and he's not alone.

"In smaller gardens and parks, the use of permaculture gardening could increase the health of the soil, retain essential water and reduce use of chemicals and water and reduce flooding," said Catherine Bullwinkle, the recently retired project manager for the New York State Department of Health'sBrownfields Redevelopment Project, who helped Pizzo find land and initial funding. "Increasingly throughout the world, there is a recognition that in urban areas, access to green space is essential for good health and benefits residents by recharging them when they spend time in nature."

Alicia Luhrssen-Zombek, land retention, new ventures, fresh markets educator at the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Oneida County, had heard a lot about the garden, but recently took a tour.

"Just the fact that I saw a praying mantis there yesterday was pretty impressive," she said.

She said she can picture "edible sanctuaries" forming a border between city and natural areas in several parts of the area, offering "a really great way to break some of those borders between this concrete jungle and some of the raw land around it, including the Adirondacks."

Luhrssen-Zombek also sees educational value in the demonstration garden, whether for teaching backyard gardeners about beneficial plants with multiple purposes or helping farmers understand ways to overcome issues, such as erosion, she said.

Pizzo's demonstration garden is not neat and orderly; there are no rows. It looks overgrown with plants sprawling in a deceptively random manner across a hillside.

Strawberries and yarrow cover the ground under golden raspberry and red raspberry bushes, and American hazelnut and juneberry shrubs. Purple and white flowers decorate Virginia mountain mint, oregano, anise hyssop and chive plants. Great black wasps, native bees and butterflies flit between the flowers. Fruit and nut trees -- peach, pear, paw paw, apricot, plum (both bubblegum and superior), American chestnut, American persimmon, northern pecan -- will someday grow tall enough to form the garden's canopy.

The plants serve many purposes, providing food for humans and wildlife, and wildlife habitat. Plants like elderberry and comfrey have medicinal uses. And the plants have environmental benefits, pulling carbon and nitrogen out of the air, for example; the nitrogen improves the soil without the need for fertilizers.

"The world we live in is a self-regulating system," Pizzo said.

And that's the way he wants the world to grow food.

Contact reporter Amy Neff Roth at 315-792-5166 or follow her on Twitter (@OD_Roth).

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