Food Forest Initiative of Cape Cod

At A Glance

Contact: 

Rand Burkert

Location: 

East Orleans, Massachusetts

Primary Issue Area:

  • Living Economies
  • Food
  • Environmental Health
  • Climate Change & Energy
  • Land & Water

Active since:

2016

Tax Status:

Ad-hoc

Our Purpose

Our mission statement is “Strengthening Cape Cod's Biodiversity and Food Sovereignty Through Edible Public Plantings and Educational Actions.” We have four “gardens” on the ground as of 2021. Our work is connected to insights of Restoration Agriculture but also Social Permaculture. We are a non-hierarchical collaborative working by consensus. The impulse came originally from potlucks where we hatched ideas, then fulfilled them, with wheelbarrows, shovels, mulch, mushroom spore, and plants from our gardens. The wish to feed a “Commons” or Gift Economy mentality is a strong drive in our group, and we believe our Work Days afford rich opportunities for information exchange that feed back into the creativity of our projects. Since 2019 we have labored under a power lines Right-of-Way, to start a “Forest Garden Walking Commons” with support from Harwich Water Department and Eversource, our local power company. We see our work as creating “food for people and Nature,” observing and documenting success of mixed agroforestry plantings, and seeking primarily to involve people in a direct relationship with land, finding in the power lines the interstices where some freedom of action is possible, with group responsibility. We give library workshops or seminars for middle-schoolers in efforts to use “citizens' science” to extend a sense of the possible – for nutrition and human connection.