Little Forests Kingston

Today at HWY 15 Kelly and Helena are planting a Medicine Wheel pollinator garden to invite a diversity of species back to the land. If you have any native plants to donate, bring them by.

Meeting June 5: Creating a Toolkit

Saturday 10:00 am zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81195507009?pwd=cHdyaVpFUVNrRmVBYmdnR1lWcVZrQT09

Why a toolkit

“We want to create a tool kit so other communities can have a guide, of key things to consider when planting a Little Forest from beginning to point of forest resiliency at 3 years . We hope to design the tool kit based on what we have and will learn and on areas of expertise of members. We think that the tool kit will be a way to share important key learnings in stories, photos, art and sound, curated examples from our own and other’s projects and the numeric data we collect. The toolkit can have space for individual and the collective experiences.

We see the toolkit as a tool of knowledge dissemination. With that in mind, we also propose that we focus the design of our data collection by its end use in a tool kit.

We hope that the toolkit will have a digital life, in a website.

So, for now, as Joyce might say, let us design a little and build a little, within this general framework of a tool kit.”

~Maureen

How a toolkit

That’s what we’re going to figure out (and talk about)!

Who?

Jennifer Dare, with the help of the working group, will curate the content as it’s created by the Little Forest community and help facilitate the process of data and content collection.

Some resources

Jennifer shared this Toolkit for enabling laws on community forestry. “This toolkit is aimed at decision-makers supporting community forestry policy. The tool kit can also be used by communities to advocate for appropriate community forestry policy in their area. The toolkit focuses on two primary components (1) key points for a democratic approach and (2) ten thematic areas as foundational to community forestry policy.”

A Pattern Language is a type of toolkit, a series of 2-4 page patterns for designing rooms, buildings, towns and more. “These tools allow anyone, and any group of people, to create beautiful, functional, meaningful places. You can create a living world.”

Citizen’s Urban Forestry Coolkit: a great example of a toolkit to help residents better understand the values of green spaces and offer a new way of reading and understanding landscape. Coolkit is developing tools and guides to ramp up community engagement through conversations, maps, visioning and action.

Little Forests happenings

Lakeside Garden Workbee Hours: Starting this Tuesday we’ll host regular meeting and work sessions. Drop in to help out or visit if you can Sunday mornings at 9:00 am or Tuesday afternoons at 3:00 pm. We’ll do things like finish the Little Forest prep (spreading leaves, coffee grounds, grass clippings, and using u-bar digger to decompact soil), ID plants and insects with iNaturalist, water seedlings, build shelters, and dig ponds.

$5000 donation to gofundme by Old Navy: And we have the Sweetgrass Circle to thank for their awesome video! In researching why Old Navy made the donation, the Sweetgrass team discovered this article about Old Navy teaming up with an 11 year old activist to choose 51 environmental projects from around the world being led by young activists. We’ve now raised $14,654!

Another Little Forest in the works at AAMHS: Addiction & Mental Health Services on Lyon Street has been working with Loving Spoonful and the Master Gardeners on a plan to reinvigorate the vegetable garden and plant an orchard on a mostly grassy piece of land to the east of their building. After an on the land meeting, they’re also now keen on including a Little Forest in the design as well.

Inspiration from around the web

World must rewild on a massive scale says UN: “Restoration needs to be seen as an infrastructure investment in a country’s [and city’s] wellbeing. We need imagination.”

10 rewilding principles: “Rewilding: the process of rebuilding, following major human disturbance, a natural ecosystem by restoring natural processes and the complete or near complete food-web at all trophic levels as a self-sustaining and resilient ecosystem using biota that would have been present had the disturbance not occurred. This will involve a paradigm shift in the relationship between humans and nature. The ultimate goal of rewilding is the restoration of functioning native ecosystems complete with fully occupied trophic levels that are nature-led across a range of landscape scales. Rewilded ecosystems should - where possible - be self-sustaining requiring no or minimum-intervention management (i.e. natura naturans or “nature doing what nature does”), recognising that ecosystems are dynamic and not static.”

Community ownership is key: An interesting article on equity in city green space.

Conservation and coloniality: “The notion of nature as a separate bounded entity that only flourishes in the absence of human touch prevented settlers from recognizing that what they saw as ‘wilderness’ was actually landscapes deeply shaped by people… This forces us to ask the question: what is the appropriate place for the human animal in an ecology?”

What a Saami-led project in Arctic Finland can teach us about Indigenous science. “What the science community in general could learn from this process is the earth-bound quality of knowing… In the Saami language they have specific names for different ages of salmon, whether they are female or male, coming or returning, going out the ocean, so they can capture what science can’t.”