Little Forests Kingston

Little Forest happenings

• AMHS Workbees: Kelsey, the Site Champion for the AMHS Food Forest and Little Forest needs your help to prepare for the arrival of 20 fruit trees next week and to finish the forest floor for the fall planting of the Little Forest.

  • May 21 from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm at 35 Lyons Street

  • May 28 from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm at 35 Lyons StreetIf you have a shovel, garden fork or wheelbarrow bring them if you can.

• LFK Visual Identity: BMDodo Strategic Design reviewed everyone’s feedback and is ready to present their concepts for Little Forests Kingston’s visual identity.

  • Monday May 23 at noon on zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89269900314?pwd=VFVlM2QrRWxzNElPTmpFeWI1dUl0UT09

• HWY 15 Workbees: Maureen needs help with roofing and the water structure - digging a trench for first section of water delivery to the Little Forest. Call, text (613-217-4441) or email Maureen ([email protected]) if you can help

  • Tuesday May 24 & Wednesday May 25

• Kingston Secondary School & NCRA Toolkit: Public Works is printing a brochure for the NCRA Toolkit pilot Joanne is leading out of Kingston Secondary School. If you’re in Kingscourt, watch for the brochures and for Grade 12 students mapping the neighbourhood.

• Signage for Auden Park Forest: Citizens are complaining about a forest in Auden Park, asking the City to clean it up. Anyone interested in helping with ideas for a sign the City would like to install to help educate residents on benefits of natural forests?

Bioblitz at Belle Park

The work Maureen at the Belle Island Caretakers are doing to remove European Buckthorn and restore biodiversity at Belle Island is a great model for how we might steward Little Forests. Hone your observation skills, practice using iNaturalist and learn to recognize some of the many native species on Belle Island by participating in the Bioblitz.

Tree survival looks great!

Maureen reports that at HWY 15 “All the the little trees are leafing out - fingers crossed - the survival rate looks very good - looks super promising that the tree coaching , ground prep, 80% planted by children has done very well.”

I need to take some pictures of the Lakeside Little Forest, I’ll do that for the next newsletter.

Decolonizing our relationship with land

This week Maureen posted this picture to the HWY 15 Facebook page. She NEEDS t-shirts!

Monoculture lawn-centricity is still the dominant idea of what landscape in a city should be. And our property standards bylaws still enforce this colonial norm, though these bylaws are beginning to shift. The Sinclairs just won their battle to naturalize their yard, which includes a Little Forest! Kingston’s bylaw will be up for review in 2023 and one of our goals is to transform it into a bylaw that supports biodiversity.

UN has declared May 22 Biodiversity Day. This year’s theme is building a shared future for all life. The work we’re doing with Little Forest is critical to protecting and restoring biodiversity.

What is the meaning of land?

Robin Wall Kimmerer, an enrolled member of Citizen Potawatomi Nation, says that "It’s not the land that is broken. It is our relationship with the land that is broken."

In her talk Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass she contrasts the differences in the meaning of land from a Eurocentric worldview.

To the meaning of land from an Indigenous worldview.

Narrative Futures Lab proposes a reframing of land from a dominant narrative in which land is seen as vulnerable to people in need of either defending or as a scarce resource to be fought over...

to a non-binary narrative of "with land we can".

How might, with Little Forests, challenge the framing of land as resource, as property, as capital, as an ecosystem service?