buffalogarden: plantyhamchuk: Kirkwood Urban Forest Transformation - “The Plateau”

buffalogarden:plantyhamchuk:Kirkwood Urban Forest Transformation - “The Plateau”I’ve realized I’ve referenced this multi-year project a ton, but I’m not sure I’ve ever quite shown it. Unfortunately I don’t have photos of before it was bushwhacked with heavy machinery - it was an impenetrable field of garbage and garbage plants, covered with kudzu, nor do I have any personal photos of the aftermath. Click on them above for larger pictures and captions.I cannot tell you how many extensive hours of my life I personally spent cleaning this area up. Decades ago, this was part of a small street with small houses. At some point, the street just… died. Someone - likely the neighbor whose vehicles you can see in some pictures - went through here with heavy equipment and created an artificially flat surface, out of the concrete rubble of the houses and even plowed through the original street. Then at some point it was open season here for dumping concrete. It’s all buried under here. Although it may look like there’s soil, there’s barely any, and there’s weird gaps underground due to the uneven chunks of said concrete and asphalt. Like the rest of the garden, this forgotten area was turned into a community dumping ground.It was a problem area, yet it held a ton of potential - at least 1 acre / 0.4 hectare of full sun in the city! What we didn’t have was much of a budget. What we did have was some occasional large groups of unskilled volunteers, our own labor and time, occasional access to large machinery if we were nice to someone who was a bit prickly, with an eventually-reached goal of establishing a native wildflower/native wild grass area. The thinking was that everyone, human and non-human, could enjoy such a space, and nothing like it exists for miles. We also knew that we probably couldn’t create something that could support trees or major structures on a pile of flattened rubble, but we could pull off wildflowers.So after years of repeated bushwhacking, taking down some old dead trees, digging down to remove massive kudzu roots / corms by hand, pulling out garbage garbage garbage broken glass more garbage, pulling out hundreds of car tires and actually befriending the prickly individual (who turned out to be awesome), we had the basic green field of photo #2. We needed soil, and we needed a LOT of it. So, we called up the local power company and told them they could dump all their wood chips and logs there. We would be driving down the road near the garden (Memorial Drive) and see an arborist also driving down the road - whoever was not driving would get the phone # of the truck, and contact them to dump wood chips there. Anyone we could find with excess wood chips, they were dumped. Each pile you see here was at least 8 ft / 2.4 meters tall. Things were allowed to cook down, until they’d used up all available internal nitrogen, then V added some cheapass nitrogen fertilizer, to help them finish cooking. Whenever you have large piles like this, they’ll naturally start composting, the fertilizer just adds an extra kick, and they shrink or cook down dramatically. The whole plateau area was a steaming pile of composting wood chip goodness. This is roughly 4 years into the process, at this point we moved away if not physically, then emotionally. But now there was no garbage, no massive weeds, no trees to be removed, no field of kudzu and there was a huge layer of rich organic matter for planting into (as DIYers know - prepwork is 90% of any project).The last picture, which I did not take, is the most recent photo.Like the rest of the garden, we poured ourselves into this project. We’re not the most sociable people, and living in the city in close quarters with other people is actually pretty stressful for introverts. The community garden was both our refuge and our training ground for what we’re doing now. What we learned is that if you’re ever looking at ground you simply can’t garden on, be it crappy ass clay or something horribly abused in an urban space, you build up, and you can do it for free via woodchips. The only downsides to this technique 1) this can take an entire season (at least) and 2) if you do not wait for it to finish cooking you can burn the crap out of your roots that way (RIP blueberries). This is different from mulching, which is also a great practice. This is cheaper than building raised beds and buying bags of soil. If you only have a tiny little space you’re working with, then some scrap rock/brick/wood plus bags of soil mixed with aged kitchen compost is probably the way to go. But if you need to cover a larger area, have no budget or don’t mind waiting, I can’t recommend anything higher. If you live in a place with no trees, you’ll need a slightly different strategy, obviously, but the goal is the same - compost all the organic matter you can get your hands on.The Plateau was technically all guerrilla gardening. V was the mastermind for this entire project, start to finish.Amazing. I am awestruck by this project– the sheer grit and determination to keep at it over so many years is staggering. I would love to see updates as it progresses!Also, in regards to the possibility of trees: a few years back I read that the popular image of tree roots being mirror images of branches is completely wrong, and that a lot of the roots for feeding and for stability are just below the surface of the soil. I think you could probably get away with a couple of fruit trees, especially if you keep them small or build small raised beds for them. Maybe figs or dwarf peach trees, or other stone fruit? Thank you! It was indeed a labor of great love, blood, and sweat.At this point, fruit trees might be possible on the Plateau. The garden itself already has a small orchard, so if the remaining members were willing and able to put in the effort, it would be doable. It’s less a technical issue and more a human one. The existing orchard already has some serious damage, due to abuse and neglect. One of the prettiest plum trees I tended for years looked mortally wounded during my last visit. So wildflowers would probably be best for now.It’s always important to consider skill level and time commitments when working with these community spaces. Before we left I tried to train several people to replace me, but they all fizzled out. I can’t teach people if they don’t bother to show up. Hopefully in time some other folks in the neighborhood will fall in love with this space and it’s incredible potential as much as we did - the whole area is roughly 5 acres, most of it forest. I’ll definitely take more pictures and share here the next time we visit. You can find previous writeups on this space here -- source link

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