Submitted by fadedrosebud t3_11xqhux in pittsburgh
I know there have been a few attempts to create food forests in Pittsburgh but I wish we could spark a vibrant effort to plant more. This is a win-win situation for many reasons. These are living, free food pantries.
“One day in September, the temperature on an exposed street in Dunbar Spring was 123F (50C), while a shaded street was just 85F (30C) – a 38F (20C) difference.”
Pretty sure coghill is a partner on that too and has actually been supportive/trying to do that as well
Not sure about your neighborhood but we need the wildlife managed a bit better where I'm at or else the animals would just gobble everything up.
Anything edible in my yard gets decimated.
I love the idea though and have been planning to turn my yard into more of a food forest or edible permaculture. Still have to figure out the wildlife situation.
Bring back cougars imo
(only half joking)
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The problem now is we keep cutting down the forests and putting up housing plans. We put the housing Plans up where the deer used to eat and live and get mad when they come eat our gardens…
True, but we should bring back cougars anyway.
Wow. Thanks for sharing this info about the predator/mile issue. I don't think I have ever heard it and I find it very interesting.
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Hell yeah, I am very pro-cougar
You talking about the deer in Brighton Heights?
Or Squirrel Hill. Or Greenfield. Or Hazelwood. Anywhere near Schenley and Frick Parks, I suspect, since naturalists say they've basically razed the edible park vegetation and are starving so they're roaming the streets in search of food and getting hit by cars.
I tried a vegetable garden the first year we after we bought our Squirrel Hill South house and realized about halfway into the season that I was basically the personal chef for a family of groundhogs.
Yes!
We also have a lot of groundhogs, some turkeys, raccoons, and not sure what else and I don't exactly know who eats what other than deer, which will eat nearly anything!
Side note, I love watching the turkeys!!!
Lots of us hunters would love to help solve this problem. Ha
I know I’ve contemplated going in the woods behind Brighton heights with my bow haha
Same out here in Penn Hills! I asked my neighbor if they'd tell on me if I "took care of the problem" myself with my bow.
Her response? "Oh, but the deer are so pretty!"
😒 ...
Oh you don’t want to eat those deer anyway. The bio accumulation of an herbivore in this town has got to be INTENSE.
Ah, I hadn't thought about that. That's a shame.
I actually didn't know anything about bio accumulation until I was reading about it further in this thread, but in my head I had only applied it to plants.
Unfortunately grazers are worse than plants, and predators are worse than grazers. Every time you go up a rung on the food chain it gets worse and worse. It’s yet another reason that the deer population is as outrageously out of control as it is.
Fruit from plants is kinda the only safe thing if you’re growing it in unsafe soil.
It’s tragic what a century of industry has done to the ecology in this region.
And what about wasting disease? I'm not really knowledgeable about eating game, but I just get this feeling that it might be polluted and possibly diseased.
I’ve asked around Penn Hills before with the same response.
The deer situation is dire. I wish someone with the authority to do so would at least start moving towards action. I don't think it's kinder to leave them to starve to death than it would be to cull some of the population, and it's not like they're going to stop reproducing.
I have had the same issues and I’m in Westwood. The deer, rabbits and groundhogs ruined everything I had outside. I want to do some kind of small greenhouse that would protect my stuff. It would have to be cheap. And I like to start composting too.
We have the earth machine backyard composer from Pennsylvania Resources Council workshop. It has worked well!
I looked them up. Thank you!
A significant amount of the topsoil in this area is contaminated with lead among other things which is why generally home gardeners are advised to use raised flowerbeds. I'm all for trees, but unfortunately I think this is a dream that we're not eligible for. I suppose we could bring in soil and test but it raises the bar to start.
Allegheny County Conservation District free soil test
Allegheny County Conservation District is providing free lead soil tests April 19.
Just adding in a resource in case anyone wants it.
Thank you. I didn't know where to go to get this done.
Fruit trees are still good, leafy greens are what bioaccumulate heavy metals, very rarely do plants put heavy metals in the fruit. Apples, pears, paw paw, would all do well, as well as berries, cherries grapes etc.
How fucked is it that the literal earth in our city is contaminated to the point that you might not be able to safely grow your own food in your backyard? We wonder why people think it’s okay to litter so much in our community - well, the literal soil is filled with the garbage that corporations have been spewing into the air for 100+ years. Who is going to pay for that?? (Rhetorical question, because WE are… not the corporations or the crooked politicians who allow the 1% to continue to do business despite showing that they have NO concern for our health and no intention of cleaning up after themselves- Norfolk southern great recent example of this).
I think the finger has to be pointed back at ourselves. We as individuals are the ones responsible for driving leaded-gas fueled personal automobiles and painting our houses with lead paint. It's clearly us, the individual citizens, who are to blame. If anything, many people argued against regulations when they were first enacted.
Put simply it isn't big business that put lead into our soil. We don't get to blame someone else for this one.
I genuinely can’t tell if this is sarcastic lol. I’m hoping it is.
That was genuine, not sarcastic. It is human nature to blame others when we're actually at fault ourselves. Big business didn't put the lead paint in the soil of my yard. If we're going to find someone to blame, it would have to be everyone from previous generations, not just rich/powerful people.
I can imagine how polluted the soil is here, that’s sad.
Don't sunflowers help extract heavy metals from the soil?
We just need to plant 900 gazillion sunflowers.
We know sunflowers are inspirational plants, even to famous painters. Vincent Van Gogh loved sunflowers so much, he created a famous series of paintings, simply called ‘sunflowers’.
I would love this.
And they are almost effortless to grow.
Agree. So many crops bioaccumulate the bad stuff. More people need to be cognizant of this. Do soil tests!!!!!
I’m all for it, but it’s easier said than done. Investing in community vegetable gardens or community orchards, or berry patches is a much better and more feasible option than having apple trees as street trees.
2 paw paw tree on every corner
So people can eat pawpaws for the one week of the year when ripe pawpaws exist?
Yes.
That would be nice, but they aren't really good shade trees. I just wish they would get more pawpaws to grow close to trails in the parks. That one pawpaw patch in Schenley Park gets absolutely looted every September and people have to tramp through the undergrowth to get there, which isn't great for the ecosystem.
Hello! Let me introduce you to this incredible, new invention! I like to call it a Freezer!
I'm told they give you the shits if you eat more than a few?
I'm sure they do.
Trees yes, fruit trees no. Not only is urban farming terribly inefficient, and the fact that fruit trees need constant upkeep and a ton of times to produce any fruit at all, but they also attract animals. It's a much better use of resources to fund more local supermarkets to address food deserts, and plant more regular urban trees separate.
Agreed. And anything other than trees for food...fruit bushes, etc. are much better bang for buck. Fruit trees get diseases easily
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Hazelnuts!
Well there's a lot of different berries...don't they count??
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Agreed. And anything other than trees for food...fruit bushes, etc. are much better bang for buck. Fruit trees get diseases easily.
Oh yeah, where the food gets trucked in from halfway across the planet and costs too much because of corporations inflating prices. Sounds like a great thing for the poor, good job, I'm surprised nobody thought of this already! I definitely don't want my neighborhood dirtied up with animals and poor people picking apples.
I like the idea of planting more trees. We have a great tree canopy here but many neighborhoods lack enough trees. But I am really skeptical that this would have a measurable impact on hunger. I think there's a reason that the article spent virtually zero time talking about this angle.
Foraging/harvesting is work and if someone is struggling to feed their family, they are already likely time-poor, so telling them to go do some unpaid labor seems unhelpful.
Also, wouldn't there be a ton of produce that gets eaten by wildlife or just falls on the ground and rots, whereas if you had an actual orchard with staff who knew when and how to harvest food, you'd have less waste?
And then there's the issue of the food only being available for a very limited time each year.
You make some valid points, but like most ideas that offer solutions to multiple problems, food forests are more helpful for some problems than others. The amount of edible produce available wouldn't solve a city's hunger problem, but it's better than a barren landscape that does nothing. As the article states "before the pandemic Dunbar Spring held annual community-wide milling events, in which pods harvested from the hundreds of mesquite trees in the neighborhood were ground into flour – giving them a year’s supply of flour."
More importantly, the neighborhood described benefited from a whopping 38 degree difference in temperature which is enough to justify the whole project IMO. And the plantings help absorb and mitigate storm run-off.
I'm totally down for food forests, edible stuff growing everywhere but I'm not sure we need more shade, here. We're not exactly in danger of desertification. I think the temperature difference is a poor argument for this area. Stick to the better selling points, like fruit, food and general air quality.
On a super hot day this summer, go to The Strip that lacks lots of trees and vegetation. Then go to Allegheny Cemetery and feel the temperature difference. It is staggering.
Exactly! Maybe our hot weather doesn't compare to Tuscon's but it still gets uncomfortable and causes heavy energy use for air conditioning. Look at neighborhoods like Squirrel Hill or Point Breeze for example where almost every residential street has long-established shade trees. Then look at Morningside which is also a generally pleasant neighborhood but has a sparse tree canopy making it feel not as nice.
I hear you. I moved here from Texas, where we had months of temperatures that only happen for a week at best, in Pittsburgh. I'm also not out in shorts in 40 degree weather so my take on it is really pretty subjective.
Tree Pittsburgh has a map showing tree cover in the various neighborhoods. I think there's a newer map but this page has info from 2012. The "2012 State of the Urban Forest" has a lot of the data on tree cover in various neighborhoods.
To be clear, I'm a huge fan of all the trees here, and we should definitely plant more. I'm just not personally moved by the issue of it being too hot in the summer.
And, like any carefully thought out planting, plants would be picked with a variety of harvest times, so it wouldn't be a very limited time each year.
Food not lawns
We need to participate in the ones that exist that's a start.....
I got a whole hillside. Feel free to clear it and plant some corn.
You’re asking for a landslide if you want to clear all the current vegetation and replace it with corn.
Don't worry. They arent gonna take me up on the offer.
I would suggest looking into taking a Permaculture Design Certification course offered by the Garfield Urban Farm, or at least check out what they've done there. It's very inspiring, and they have the knowledge and resources to help one take small steps towards sustainability in your own space.
Wild black raspberries do very well here without any care. In fact, I spent years trying to eradicate them from my old property, lol.
It seems like many people are taking the approach that if an idea doesn't totally solve all aspects of a problem it's no good. Like the old saying, "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." Urban food forests aren't going to be perfect, but they could contribute in many ways and are cheaper and more practical than some other solutions.
Southside has a community garden that’s open to all!
Really frustrating to see people commenting about "what about the wildlife?!" as though animals don't also exist in this world and need to eat? I totally understand the issue of deer overgrazing, especially in the parks. It's a big problem. But another big problem is this anthropocentric worldview that doesn't take into account the multitude of other living things that also your neighbors. When humans take away green space for development, the wildlife are left with nowhere else to go but your backyards and nothing else to eat but what's growing there.
I totally support more food forests for everyone, human and non-human alike
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I got a whole hillside. Feel free to clear it and plant some corn
Deer are food.
There are deer in any patch of trees larger than 2,000 square feet.
We already have an overabundance of urban food forests in Pittsburgh.
Trees left unchecked create massive problems for infrastructure
I agree with the point but there's not much room for them downtown
It doesn't have to be downtown. Read the article, it refers to residential neighborhoods, and it's not all large trees. The concept includes bushes and understory plantings.
Who mentioned downtown?
Have you seen this city? Jesus christ.
Sounds like a meme. Maybe nice to bring the community together or something, but it's not going to solve any problems here.
How do you know?
The Garden of Eden was one and done unfortunately
timesuck t1_jd4c9af wrote
Councilperson Deb Gross is working on this, but I don’t think she gets a ton of support from many other members of council. I know she’s supported food forest initiatives in her district though and Morningside definitely got some fruit trees at one point to expand their community garden.
You should talk to your councilperson. City owns a lot of land it’s currently doing nothing with.