Edible Blue Ridge Spring 2023

Opposite: Mari Lopez, Tom Benevento, Samuel Lasiti. Above, clockwise: Jubilee Climate Farm, Garden beds are prepared for planting, Garden plans, A hillside is prepared for next season. wherein a hilly area is planted with alternat ing bands of crops and soil-stabilizing trees and shrubs, Jubilee is able to transform the rolling Shenandoah Valley hills into fertile and productive farmland. The combination of these strategies il lustrates the first of Jubilee’s three objectives: to create a model for research, experimenta tion and implementation of the best carbon farming practices. The farm is a patchwork of indigenous agricultural systems practic ing resilience to extreme weather events such as excessive rainfall or severe drought, both current realities of climate change. Animals will be contained and farm boundaries established with hedgerows of Osage orange trees, a thick swath of living fence similar to the acacia hedgerows of Samuel Lasiti Moriaso’s home in Kenya. Lasiti is volunteering at Jubilee through Mennonite Central Committee’s (MCC) International Volunteer Experience Program (IVEP). At Jubilee he is able to teach Kenyan farming techniques while learning new car bon farming strategies to take home to his community, where chemical spray programs are typical. “I’m not just going into farming because I love farming; I want to change the way people farm and make people aware that quick solutions with chemicals are not the answer,” explains Lasiti. If you’re looking to implement a carbon farming strategy in your own farm or gar den, the Jubilee team recommends syntropic

cut trees back close to ground level to pre vent them from shading out vegetable beds, the biomass becomes your mulch, returning carbon to the soil. Benevento explains how this method mimics a healthy ecosystem: “Everything is grown right there. An ecosys tem doesn’t require hauling materials from another location, stealing nutrients from somewhere else. We want to grow a system that is self-sufficient.” Jubilee’s second objective is to pro vide land access to recent immigrants who wish to grow their own food. Participants from the Congo, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Eritrea, and other regions have

agriculture. David the Good’s informative and funny 2021 book Grocery Row Gar dening makes the precise and regimented syntropic system accessible “for normal people working in normal backyards with normal schedules.” Lasiti explains the name of Good’s method of planting trees and shrubs in the midst of annual garden beds: “The different rows and heights are like dif ferent shelves of things in a grocery store.” In a Grocery Row Gardening system, you can have the best of a food forest, kitchen garden and orchard all in one. The fruit and nut trees can act as trellises for beans and squash to grow up. When you coppice, or

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