A team of five foresters will finish what is likely the largest mass planting of trees in St. Albert’s history this Sunday.
About 40 St. Albert Scouts helped plant some 640 seedlings in the Grey Nuns White Spruce Park Wednesday – the first chunk of about 7,000 baby trees set to be added to the forest this week.
A team of professional foresters will take care of the remaining 6,360 trees this Sunday, said Daryl D’Amico, co-chair of the Grey Nuns White Spruce Park working group.
The planting, likely the largest one-day tree planting event in the city’s history, is part of the working group’s plan to roughly double the size of the historic white spruce forest in two years.
The seedlings are part of a group of about 10,000 baby trees currently growing at a nursery near Smokey Lake, D’Amico said.
“The seedlings are genetically matched to the site,” he noted, as they were grown from seed collected from trees in the park.
The seedlings are going into a patch of forest that was cleared long ago for use as farmland, D’Amico said. Earlier this year, crews used heavy equipment to scarify (flip over and mound) this field to wipe out its thick grass and give the seedlings a chance to grow. These seedlings all have such great root systems that he predicts over 90 per cent of them will survive.
D’Amico said the remaining 3,000 seedlings at Smokey Lake will mature for another year before being planted here next summer.
Questions on the reforestation project should go to the city’s recreation department at 780-418-6063.
A city gardener hopes residents will get their hands dirty next weekend to help dig St. Albert’s first food forest.
The St. Albert Urban Agriculture Conversation group is digging earthworks for a self-sustaining food forest this June 25 at Grain Elevator Park. The event comes in the wake of months of talks held by the group on permaculture – a system of agricultural and social design principles that uses or mimics natural processes.
A food forest is a self-sustaining garden built using the principles of permaculture, said group organizer and St. Albert gardener Jill Cunningham. By using perennials instead of annuals and by co-locating mutually beneficial plants next to each other (e.g. a nitrogen-fixing plant by a nitrogen-hungry one), the forest grows food continuously without human intervention.
“You kind of work yourself out of a job,” she said.
This food forest will be a demonstration plot that will show how similar food production sites could be created elsewhere in St. Albert, Cunningham said. When finished, it will include edible plants such as saskatoons, raspberries, pears, and currants, most of which were donated by Hole’s Greenhouses, and should enhance the city’s food security by creating a source of local food.
Cunningham said she hoped to get about 50 volunteers out next weekend to dig holes and swales for the food forest. (There’s no water at the site yet, so the actual plants won’t go in until later this year.) Volunteers should bring drinking water, food, good shoes, and possibly a rake to the work site. Edmonton’s Root for Trees is supplying shovels.
The work-bee runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. with a free potluck lunch at around noon. Volunteers can stay as long as they like. Call Cunningham at 780-418-8814 for details.
