Seymour Park in Green Bay is home to food forest. PC: Fox 11 Online
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Income, employment status, race or a disability are just some of the reasons people may be suffering from food insecurity. A push is on in one Green Bay neighborhood to help those less fortunate.
Volunteers spent Friday doing maintenance and planting on what is known as zones one and two of the Seymour Park Food Forest, just off Ashland Avenue in Green Bay.
“Food forest is seven layers of food starting tubers in the ground up until vines and nut trees. For this community we’re trying to get more food available because it’s a fairly low income poverty stricken area,” said Josh Kufahl, with the Seymour Park Food Forest Project.
What started out about ten years ago has grown in both size and harvest, with hopes to continue to flourish. The goal of the food forest is to help combat food insecurity and address food deserts that exist within the city limits.
According to Kufahl, “The push is to get more berry plants, fruit trees in so we can have the neighborhood hopefully get involved and helping and building a more resilient food system.”
With the help of recent grant funding, through St. Norbert Abbey’s Augustine Stewardship Fund Trust, the Seymour Park Food Forest project was able to buy additional trees and plants along with equipment to help grow and maintain the gardens. The outside funding helps to ensure whatever is grown here is free to whoever wants and needs it, and is willing to put in the effort to harvest it.
“The biggest benefit is that it will be available to all of the public and there’s no cost to it. The hope will be that the neighborhood will find value in it,” said Kufahl. He added, “If we can get more of these city parks to start putting in food we have more people that will hopefully be able to get access to nutritional food.”
Sarah Jane Peters is a food forest volunteer, who also lives in the neighborhood. She benefits from the fruits of her labor and estimates these gardens help her save her family hundreds of a dollars a year.
“I pay, for homemade apple sauce, I pay less than a dollar a jar for a pint that I make myself. And it’s pink and it’s beautiful and it’s fresh and it’s organic and so I couldn’t get that in the store,” said Peters.
While the gardens can help to food on the table for those in the community, it’s the sense of community that the forest helps to build that is what is most bountiful.
Peters added, “I’m a mental health professional, I’m a licensed professional counselor, I know more than ever our community needs socialization. We need to feel a part of something and involved in something and really caring for our body, mind, and soul. And when we have community spaces that are healthy and encouraging that, we are doing that, we are doing huge things for our community.”
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