Congratulations and praise to the St. Albert urban agriculture group who are responsible for the community food forest. Gratitude to the City of St. Albert for supporting the food forest through offering city-owned land stewarded by Arts and Heritage.
Before I found out about the food forest through the article (Gazette, June 14), I was walking along a crowded path by Lacombe Lake Park. The sound of construction echoed. I remembered when Lacombe Lake Park used to be a pastoral paradise with a stretch of bush and farmland beyond. As I viewed the last green space at the west edge of St. Albert where McKenney Avenue meets Ray Gibbon Drive, I wished that I had the funds to buy the farmland to preserve it.
My eight-year-old granddaughter and I bicycled to the spot later in the day. We sat by the duck pond and enjoyed the green space. I told her how her dad and his siblings and neighborhood friends used to play in Lacombe Park Lake and the bush beside it. And how it was like we lived in the country with farmland all around us. I told her I used to sit by the lake and look out and treasure it because I knew one day all the farmland around would be developed.
“Let this place be our happy hideaway before more houses and stores are built here,” she said, then added: “Will all the lakes and rivers be drained too to put up houses and stores?”
“When you grow up maybe you can be a part of making sure that doesn’t happen,” I said.
“For now let us enjoy and honor this happy hideaway.”
American writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create … He stands close to nature; he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not, he causes it to be.”
Emerson owned a part of the land around Walden’s Pond in Concord Massachusetts. In 1922 his descendants teamed with other families in the area to give their land around the pond to the state. In 1975 Walden’s Pond became a state park.
We are fortunate to have our own Walden’s Pond with Big Lake, and our own unique White Spruce Forest thanks to those in the community who worked together to preserve it for us and for future generations.
Now we have the addition of the farm forest. What a treasure it would be to have the last piece of farmland preserved; a historical landmark that goes on producing and harvesting, a pause between suburbia spread and road rush.
Sandra Mooney-Ellerbeck, St. Albert
