Umami Podcast

Food Forests with Elise Evans
Elise Ballard
0:00:00
You're listening to the Umami Podcast, conversations with producers, purveyors, and scholars exploring food choices we make as a culture. I'm Ilyce Ballard, and I'm here with my friend and co-host, Chris Pfeifle. Thanks for being here.
There is this magic place in South Seattle. It's a lush garden with more than 200 different species of food plants. What used to be a giant patch of grass on a park hillside is now a climate change mitigating ecosystem with a pollinator habitat and soil that is so healthy, it is self-sustaining. It's a thriving public garden that makes fresh produce available to anyone to harvest. It's public food on public land. On this episode of the Umami Podcast, we'll talk to Elise Evans (@EliseDiFiore) of Beacon Food Forest about this grassroots organization powered by volunteers that has created some of the most unique, sustainable, and reproducible solutions to food insecurity, land access, ecology, and food education. Let's talk to Elise.
Elise DiFiore
0:01:23
Hi, Elise. I don't meet too many other Elises, to be honest.
Elise Ballard
0:01:34
Right? Very fun. This will be fun to navigate. Chris, good luck with this. Chris, this is Elise.
Chris Pfeifle
0:01:40
It's nice to meet you, Elise.
Elise DiFiore
0:01:44
Thank you. Good to meet you too, Chris.
Chris Pfeifle
0:01:45
Thank you.
Elise Ballard
0:01:46
I know you through dance, first of all. That's how you and I know each other, right? Yeah. And this show, the Umami Podcast, is about celebrating the good, clean, and fair in our food, in the Pacific Northwest, in this city.
Elise Ballard
0:02:05
there, in our food, in the Pacific Northwest, in this city. And so I have known since before I knew you that I needed to have a conversation with the people of Beacon Food Forest, and that's the reason for our conversation today.
Elise DiFiore
0:02:34
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm really passionate about the Beacon Food Forest. a volunteer home of mine for many years, and at this point, one of those metaphorical third places in my life.
Elise Ballard
0:02:05
Very nice. Metaphorical third places. I think you've got to tell us a little bit more about that.
Elise DiFiore
0:02:51
Oh, for sure. Well, I don't know who came up with the idea, but the idea being we have these places of grounding and community in our lives that might be classically our home, where we literally go home and sleep and make food, and our workplace, a place we go so often. And then a third place being some other community, some space in the world where you see the same people and show up over time and might have some family of choice and third place. People come for so many different reasons, but we're all stewarding this space and community together.
Chris Pfeifle
0:03:24
How did you begin with the Beacon Food Forest and what was the attraction to you to get involved with this?
Elise DiFiore
0:03:33
Way back in a past part of my career when I was much younger. I worked in environmental education after undergrad. And I, for some years, I did some seasonal jobs teaching youth, youth development, trail crew, those kind of things. And I heard about the Beacon Food Forest and reached out to them and said, hey, could I bring some youth for a work party? And they had had some overblown, wonderful, early publicity and wrote back to me and said,
Elise DiFiore
0:04:10
actually, we're not quite ready for public work parties, but glad you saw that press. Here is the email list to get on. And so I just brought myself to the first work party, which was in September 2012. Okay, 2012, so it was when we broke ground on, broke ground, but we actually like to say we started making ground.
Elise DiFiore
0:04:32
It was ground making day, because we started building soil in the space. And through all of my work with youth and environmental education and other community orgs, I have long been drawn to environmental restoration projects and community building and so many activities out there.
Elise DiFiore
0:04:52
You show up and pull some ivy or blackberry or plant some things and it's really valuable. You do something helpful. But it's a one-time thing and then you don't necessarily see those people again.
Elise Ballard
0:05:19
Right. It does seem like there is no attraction with Beacon Food Forest, the evolution, the growth, unprecedented, at least in this city. Am I right about that?
Elise DiFiore
0:05:19
Yeah, it's really unique. Somehow we have gone, although we do a lot of the same activities of pulling some weeds, planting some things, lots more, of course. There's more nuance, but we build community, and in the end, I like the clip that you accidentally make some friends by volunteering there. And then in my case, I came for the plants and some knowledge and the activity, which
Elise DiFiore
0:05:49
is enjoyable and outside when we spend so much time looking at screens, depending on our work. But I stayed for the people. I'm still there for the other things too, but all of us are there because we could hang out with plants and outdoor activities somewhere else, but we're doing this in community, building something bigger than ourselves. Our mission statement is built around the framework of three permaculture ethics that
Elise DiFiore
0:06:18
are care for the earth, care for the people, care, share for all. And there are more words written under all of those on our website, but those are things we come back to as touchstones of What that looks like because in the end I think BFF has become Sustainable even though we're grassroots and volunteer powered Because We care for the people we look out for each other and think about what community really needs in this space of food
Elise DiFiore
0:06:53
forest and green space. And then people come back. We care for each other and we also care for the plants and the earth and it keeps the project going because people come back to the work parties. If it wasn't fun, if we didn't celebrate, people might not come back. But it's actually, although we do a lot of work, it's also very fun.
Elise Ballard
0:07:13
Well, can you speak on the weeding out process of who stays, how long it takes to get in? And I mean, you just unpacked there. I have so many questions, so I'm going to try not to rush into them because the regeneration of space is really on our minds. But what is that, the turnover, if you will?
Elise DiFiore
0:07:35
Have you ever been there? Have you spent time there before?
Elise Ballard
0:07:39
I have walked my friend's dog easily over a hundred times through that area. It was one of my favorite places anytime I had to house sit. And Charlie and I would go for jogs and would just work, just snake our way down and watch progress through many different seasons. And you know, I remember the first time I saw it, I was like, oh, they got bees down here. Just seeing how it developed.
Elise Ballard
0:08:07
On a micro scale, it's really neat to see how plots are taken over and how the area starts developing and growing and then what starts thriving there. So yes, I've walked through there a few times.
Elise DiFiore
0:08:20
I've been there, yes. It's one that I first became aware of through some volunteer work I was doing for the Central Co-op in Capitol Hill. And I have learned about how foraging works with many various things that I've experienced there, including like mosh, lettuce that I hadn't really ever seen growing in the wild, a few other things like that. And maybe I've done a garden party or a work party or two.
Elise DiFiore
0:08:53
Cool. I'm so glad.
Elise Ballard
0:08:55
But it seems like, I think a thing we want to focus on here tonight is how you make the volunteer thing work. And when you, you didn't say volunteer, you said community. And I imagine that has a lot to do with it. So let's dig into that a little bit. Tell us about the structure. Tell us how does it work and who comes
Elise Ballard
0:09:19
and how do they get involved?
Elise DiFiore
0:09:21
Great question.
Elise DiFiore
0:09:22
So yes, we are volunteer run. A classic way to jump in and start volunteering that I recommend to everyone is the third Saturday work party. We get a lot of return volunteers and a lot of first time volunteers every time.
Elise DiFiore
0:09:45
Sometimes groups come and bring each. But yeah, there is a lot of turnover. I would say that core volunteers are what we call folks like me and many others who volunteer frequently, who show up a lot and help run events. The core volunteers might be a few dozen people at any given time.
Chris Pfeifle
0:10:09
Now, is that a necessary pathway for someone who wants to be part of the garden to... No. No?
0:10:17
Yes.
Elise DiFiore
0:10:18
No.
Elise DiFiore
0:10:19
I mean, we are always looking for people to show up more, but there is a sort of thing where for this to be sustainable, I really just hope that people find the thing that speaks to them and the thing that we need and we orient volunteers somewhat informally. The BIPOC community garden is a couple years old and it's within SiteDev and that's an affinity space for BIPOC individuals to primarily take the lead in deciding what happens there and there are more culturally relevant plants grown to South Seattle where we're like very racially diverse and diverse in many other ways.
Elise DiFiore
0:10:58
And that's something that's wonderful about the Beacon Food Forest is that it is diverse in every sort of way. The people who come to the project, we're thrown together and then know each other. I'm close friends with people I might not have met through the circles of people who are similar to me. And it's really wonderful what we end up doing together with a lot of different perspectives and strong opinions.
Elise DiFiore
0:11:21
It's really refreshing, honestly.
Elise Ballard
0:11:22
Yeah, that is clear. I think the ways that Beacon Food Forest surfaces, in my experience, wandering through the city, and that must have to do with this diversity that you have cultivated there. Let's shift gears a little bit from volunteers to city. How's the city involved? Oh, yeah.
Elise DiFiore
0:11:48
The Beacon Food Forest, I think in answering your question, I encounter a lot of people who haven't heard of food forests as a thing.
Elise Ballard
0:12:08
That's a good point.
Elise Ballard
0:12:09
Thank you.
Elise Ballard
0:12:10
Take us back. I've got to define that.
Elise DiFiore
0:12:12
Is that okay?
Elise DiFiore
0:12:13
I want to add that in.
Elise Ballard
0:12:14
Yes, please.
Elise DiFiore
0:12:15
Yes, you're right. It ties into the city in a way in that for them as well, this was a new thing and a new concept and idea that we needed to convince them was workable. So, a food forest, there are food forests all over the world. It's a very old concept. Honestly, based in permaculture principles,
Elise DiFiore
0:12:39
and permaculture principles are really based on an indigenous understanding of how land and plants and community ecosystems work together, both the earth and the people ecosystems. And so we, so food forest is an edible forest garden with forest ecosystem layers recreated.
Elise DiFiore
0:13:02
And at the Beacon Food Forest, we started from an unused blank hillside of grass. And so we think about, yeah. Yeah, we think about what people need and what pollinators need and what plants will grow tall and what plants will add nitrogen into the soil and what will come ripe at different times of year.
Elise DiFiore
0:13:26
So we plant things in groups together intentionally and sometimes we try things and learn something doesn't work and it's part of the experiment of the thing as well. Tell us about dandelions. They keep coming up for us on this show. They are definitely a theme of our indigenous food episode, many of our episodes.
Elise Ballard
0:13:49
And I want to ask you-
Elise DiFiore
0:13:50
Oh, I listened to that.
Elise DiFiore
0:13:51
It was great.
Elise Ballard
0:13:52
Oh, great. I want to ask you, what do you do with dandelions? And do they get cultivated? Do they, yeah.
0:13:58
Hmm.
Elise DiFiore
0:14:00
Well, as I'm sure you know, dandelions are edible in many ways. It kind of depends on, we have other weeds or plants that are unwanted that we prioritize picking over dandelions. If we have limited time and human capacity,
Elise DiFiore
0:14:24
we would pick the Canada thistle and the bindweed first, and the buttercup. Those things really take over and are invasive. Dandelions take over too, but yeah, we pull them if in fact we would prefer to make sure that other plants have the resources to live, to prioritize other plants in an area. So we don't cultivate them, however, people totally eat them. The greens are great in salad, the tops are great,
Elise DiFiore
0:14:54
the yellow flowers can be turned into fritters. You can grind up the root and make a drink. I haven't done that, but I've done the first two. The fritter idea is a good one. I think we gotta try that.
Chris Pfeifle
0:15:06
You know, it makes me think of a simile of an immune system where maybe you want to have a little bit of this weed on the perimeter or so. Is there any kind of simile that you can make between the soil nutrients and an immune system and the biology between the two?
Elise DiFiore
0:15:28
Ooh. That's a deep prompt. I don't know if I can fulfill your prompt, but I do. We do dandelions like many, many plants that volunteer out there. So many plants bring in pollinators. We need, we love our ground nesting bees and mason bees are brought in and we have homes
0:15:55
for them.
Elise DiFiore
0:15:57
We think about weeding back the lupine flowers that fix nitrogen. We cut back the pods only after they've wilted so the flowers bring in pollinators. So many different plants are useful for different reasons. That's great. I'd love to talk a little bit too about the output of the food forest. What comes of the fruits and vegetables that grow there on the public parts? I know that they're available for the picking, for a visitor to come and pick, first of all. Are there other, you know, gatherings and distributions that happen on a formal level?
Elise Ballard
0:16:45
Oh, that's a good question.
Elise DiFiore
0:16:46
Yes, the Beacon Food Forest is really unique in that it is an open harvest food forest on public land in a city. I believe that it was the first open harvest food forest of its kind in the U.S. It used to be maybe the largest. That's about, there might be some others that are growing that are larger, but it's currently, the whole hillside is seven acres.
Elise DiFiore
0:17:20
It's currently about half of that. And we started with 1.7 acres because the city said back in the day when we needed to convince the city that this was possible, said, hey, we do have the volunteer power, did a lot of working there to show that we had people, showed that one in 0.7 acres would work and then several years ago started doubling in size, which we are at, and the plants, so there's a lot of space, a few acres to grow plants. And open harvest, there's
Elise DiFiore
0:17:57
actually a few different ways people can get the food from there. I would say the majority of it is open harvest. Walk through and if you see trees and shrubs and other ground covers around it, that's probably an area where you can, if something is ripe and you would use it, you may pick it and so could anyone else. But just keep in mind, share, share for all. Well, how much would you really eat or use? There are also about shy of 40 pea patch garden plots, which is a little raised beds that are through a city program and that fills a different
Elise DiFiore
0:18:38
need. In an early partnership with the City of Seattle, the Department of Neighborhoods gave the food forest some early funding, which we're so grateful and still partner with them to have those individual family plots so the people who grow food there know that they can harvest that food. So we ask the public not to take food from there and those are marked individually mostly and raised square beds. But there are also some partnerships with other community
Elise DiFiore
0:19:12
community orgs like the Seattle Indian Health Board who grows a medicinal garden of things that are important to them and that's marked and we have percussion farms partnership with a black run farm in Seattle that needed some more space and we had some space and they're using some and that's there's many, many different community groups that come in. And in the end, we teach each other
Elise DiFiore
0:19:42
how to harvest in a kind of grassroots way. We're forever working on signage. Like, there is some signage. We're almost all volunteers. So I think we're doing a great job. But a lot beyond the, if there is not signage,
Elise DiFiore
0:19:56
maybe there's a person who will say hello and show you how to harvest. How to find the honey berry, for example, which you might not have seen because it's kind of under the leaves of the plant and it's one of the first berries to come right in maybe May. You've got to look under the leaves.
Elise DiFiore
0:20:10
There's a lot of plants that I met at the Beacon Food Forest that I hadn't seen before or that you wouldn't find in a grocery store.
Chris Pfeifle
0:20:19
Are there specific plants that you want to keep in the raised beds in the food forest, or is there some sort of intention about keeping a raised bed juxtaposed to just planting in the earth? I know there's a gray area there as far as planting in the earth, but...
0:20:42
Yeah.
Elise DiFiore
0:20:43
I mean, all of... I would say that what I would call raised beds at the Beacon Food Forest really are just the key patch plots, primarily. Those individual family plots that are not open harvest. But we do, but the whole space, really strikingly, was just a blank, grassy hillside before we started.
Elise DiFiore
0:21:05
And we, in order to make soil, to turn it to soil, to keep growing, we did have done, we do heat mulching in a lot of cases and lay down overlapping layers of thick cardboard and then at least six inches or more of wood chips which we get from parks. And that composts on itself and turns the grass and everything into soil, all of it.
Elise DiFiore
0:21:41
And then we plant into that, directly into the soil in a lot of cases.
Chris Pfeifle
0:21:45
I was wondering about those first steps to set up this food forest, and then the stewardship that it would take because the different plants are taking the different nutrients out of the soil. Is there suggestions about how to rotate those certain plots?
Elise DiFiore
0:22:04
Yeah, most of the sheet mulching with all of the cardboard and the wood chips is a really
Elise DiFiore
0:22:09
effective way to, through organic methods, simply to build soil, to turn grass into soil, or to suppress weeds. Also, the wood chips will deplete nitrogen from the soil, so we do think about which plants might fix nitrogen back into the soil, as one example. Much of the premise of a food forest,
Elise DiFiore
0:22:39
although sometimes if something doesn't work, we'll add something new in, hey, we learned something. In a lot of cases, it's a perennial space where we mean to think into the future of how will these plants grow in our climate and with each other.
Elise DiFiore
0:22:56
So things in the food forest don't tend to rotate. We don't, most of it isn't annual. Although the BIPOC community garden has a number of annual spaces as well as perennial spaces because it's a spot where people walk through and want to see some familiar plants that you might not see in a grocery store, but are important to someone's culture, things you might cook with that you don't see in an American grocery store.
Elise Ballard
0:23:25
So, over the years we've had different spaces that are those annual vegetables. Most of it's perennial, though. Paint some pictures for us, especially right now in late spring, what can one find if one wanders the food forest? Oh, I'm realizing that today I have a great answer to that question, which is, I mean, there's always a great answer to that question. Come through every month, every season.
Elise DiFiore
0:23:54
It's just beautiful to see it change and how colorful it is and how even in the dark, cold months. There is overwintered kale or some flowers to harvest that you don't expect. Right now, in the native guild, the wetland, a space that used to be, there's a space that used to have,
Elise DiFiore
0:24:14
as a naturally occurring wetland, where water used to run onto the street, and we needed to figure out how to keep that from happening as we started working the land. And so, some people did, volunteers did a lot of research and planted plants that need a lot of water and that are naturally occurring in wetlands here, including camas bulbs.
Elise DiFiore
0:24:42
And so right now, the camas prairies are a thing that are, camas is such an important food source to indigenous peoples of this area that have historically been wiped out in many places or minimized and you can't find them naturally occurring in too many places. But volunteers have turned this space into a small camas prairie. Right now, we're recording this in late April and it is gorgeous. It's a gorgeous field of purple right now amidst other plants.
Elise Ballard
0:25:17
It's a polyculture everywhere in the food forest. So beyond that, but you've got to go see the Camas blue right now. Okay. That's call to action number one for today.
Elise Ballard
0:25:31
Go and see the Camas...
Chris Pfeifle
0:25:33
The Camas prairie. So the Camas prairie, how long did that take to establish and how exciting was it when you saw that this was taking?
Elise DiFiore
0:25:42
Oh, that's a good question. It took a few years to do some research and plant that space and weed it back and grow it and get the right combo of plants there to thrive. I want to talk a little bit about education. What are the ways in which Beacon Food Forest, as an organization, educates people about what grows here and how it grows?
Elise Ballard
0:26:19
That's a great question. really important to us and I think is part of the care for the people and the sustainability of the space because we are not a standard community garden. We're very unique in how anyone can, you don't have to volunteer there to harvest what we grow. Anyone can come through and if you show up once in whatever way works for you, you're part of our community. People learn in many
Elise DiFiore
0:26:52
different ways and so we like to think about all the ways that people might want to gain information because part of the premise of the food forest is learning something to show up and engage with the space and knowing how to harvest a plant for the first time that you hadn't seen before and being empowered to do that. Maybe knowing how to grow something, maybe some really basic things about gardening that you can take home, because although the food forest does produce a lot of a lot
Elise DiFiore
0:27:21
of food, many many pounds of food and harvest, find a number for you in a sec, but we produce a lot of food, we do feed a lot of people for free. Apple, berries, we do have apples, pears, berries, bulbs and leaves and so many greens. But we want people to take that knowledge home as well and be able to share it with someone or grow food at home. Not everyone has a space to grow food at home,
Elise DiFiore
0:27:50
so we're trying to meet everyone where they need. We do have the education committee puts on formal classes if that's a way that someone wants to learn. We partner with, sometimes we partner with organizations like, say, Seattle Tilth or City Fruit and might host a class on permaculture design principles or mushrooms or pollinators or how to cook foods that you can harvest at the food forest,
Elise DiFiore
0:28:26
and thinking of topics from past classes. And there are, and beyond those formal routes, there are many informal education channels at the food forest where if you show up to almost any gathering or work party, just start talking to each other
Elise DiFiore
0:28:45
and to the lead at your event, and someone will know all about the weeds and how they're unique and someone will know how to identify them. Someone will know the technique to harvest a plant and how to know when it's ripe. And so we teach each other all the time together to get even the people who know a lot don't know everything. So a big take-home message I really want you to know that show up to the food forest and you don't need any background in gardening or background in community building.
Elise DiFiore
0:29:26
Truly, all are welcome. We just ask that you be kind to each other. And it's really striking. Everyone is welcome. Just if you're willing to open up to showing up and pitching in, or to just sitting and enjoying the green space, you are welcome in whatever you need from the space. That's wonderful to hear.
Elise Ballard
0:30:00
The spreading of the word, getting the word out and the showing of how, how do you do this is critical. I'm so glad that Beacon Food Forest exists for that and is talking to other communities
0:30:15
out there.
Elise Ballard
0:30:16
That's really good. Well I want to maybe steer us toward a close here by asking you, what's your favorite vegetable? Maybe right now, maybe of all time. You mentioned some pretty crazy ones when I saw you recently at an author talk. I don't even remember what they were.
Elise DiFiore
0:30:37
I'll tell you about those again. I want to tell you about some favorite vegetables and plants and can I also tell you about a couple other resources and where to find us? Absolutely, please. Yeah. Let's see, to answer your question. Oh, I love asparagus. Asparagus is one of my favorite vegetables and we are, asparagus is a perennial vegetable that we're
Elise Ballard
0:31:10
still working on growing successfully at the food forest. So I'm not sure you can find it. There's a few volunteer asparagus out there. Okay.
0:31:19
But,
Elise DiFiore
0:31:20
I have vegetables that I love and fruits at the food forest. Especially ones that I'm excited about, some things at the food forest you can't find in a grocery store or that would be uncommon.
Elise DiFiore
0:31:34
Hard to transport, hard to cultivate or produce at scale, but we can do in this project. We have cardoons. Cardoons are another perennial vegetable. Do you know cardoons? I know cardoons.
Elise Ballard
0:31:51
I know that maybe they have characteristics not unlike an artichoke. Yeah, exactly. A lot of, they're related and people, depending on the stage and growth of the plant, people often might think it's an artichoke, but they're different. And you eat different parts of the plant. With an artichoke, you eat that flower.
Elise DiFiore
0:32:15
You pick off the leaves of the bud. And with a cardoon, you eat the ribs of the fronds, like you eat the stalk. The rib of the frond, okay. Yeah, I hope that makes sense visually. And so, they're a little rough, they're not spiky, but I like to use gloves when I harvest the cardoon leaves.
Elise DiFiore
0:32:41
They get large in maybe late spring, early summer, and so you use two hands and you might cut the whole large stalk off or you can break it and then trim the rest of the leaf off. And to cook with a cardoon, the perennial vegetable comes back every year, so it produces
0:33:03
a lot of food.
Elise DiFiore
0:33:04
I like to cut it up into pieces and it's kind of stringy, pull off extra string. Cut into pieces and boil it a little bit and then I might saute it with garlic and butter and put it over pasta. Or you can puree it and make a dip of some sort. Very fun.
Chris Pfeifle
0:33:19
And you love the honey berry. You were gesturing that it's about a foot long or so that you're harvesting, right? The cardoon.
Elise DiFiore
0:33:28
Yeah, oh, maybe more.
0:33:30
Maybe less.
Elise DiFiore
0:33:31
Those leaves can be two or three feet.
Chris Pfeifle
0:33:32
This is a Jurassic cardoon.
0:33:34
Covers my face if I were to hold a hand. Exactly.
Elise DiFiore
0:33:44
And a plant that I had never seen before that's a fun one to mention is the medlar.
Elise Ballard
0:33:49
The medlar tree.
Elise Ballard
0:33:50
That was the one that you mentioned at the meeting, yes.
Elise DiFiore
0:33:54
There are these medlar trees that, okay, so when you, not if, but when you come to the There's a really fun sign that one of our co-founders, Glenn, a long-time volunteer, he made this beautiful Beacon Food Forest sign from reclaimed wood that's on 15th Avenue South.
Elise Ballard
0:34:13
You can see it.
Elise DiFiore
0:34:14
I've seen that, yeah. Yeah. And just up that trail from that sign, there are a few medlar trees. Medlars, they are fruits that are, I'm making a fish shape, but they're much smaller than that. They're like the size of a very small persimmon maybe.
Elise DiFiore
0:34:36
And medlar is kind of a brown fruit that hangs off this tree, and they come ripe after the first frost or two, late in the year, when they blet, and blet means to ripen after a frost, so when they're bleted, they soften, and then you peel them open, and then you might think they're rotten, but no, no, they're ripe,
Elise DiFiore
0:35:01
and they taste kind of like apple butter, but it's a friend of mine once made medlar jelly, which impressed me, but it's a plant that Shakespeare references, but we don't see too often around here. Okay, yeah, Medlar, that was the one that you mentioned
Elise Ballard
0:35:20
that I made a note to come back and look into.
Elise Ballard
0:35:24
That's really exciting.
0:35:26
Yeah.
Chris Pfeifle
0:35:27
Well, your excitement is absolutely contagious. Is there any place that people on the outside, other than their time, can donate or give supplies to the BFF?
Elise DiFiore
0:35:38
Oh, absolutely. We are a small nonprofit. We do a lot with a little. If people can more easily donate some money, financial resources, or something in kind, then your time, go to BeaconFoodForest.org. Well, Elise, thank you so much for giving us the rundown, I've been curious for a long time about Beacon Food Forest and how
Elise Ballard
0:36:06
it has flourished, because that is the word that I would use to describe it as I've watched it over the years. Yes, you have to come in the summer and eat some mulberries. Oh, yes, mulberries.
Elise DiFiore
0:36:17
Come in the summer and eat some mulberries.
Elise Ballard
0:36:18
You have mulberry trees?
Elise Ballard
0:36:19
Oh, my gosh, I'm there.
Elise DiFiore
0:36:20
There are mulberry trees, including this lavender medlar that's kind of white with a purple tinge. Oh. It's very fun. Beautiful. I'm coming to see that. There's so much you all listening need to come check out, just have an interactive experience. You never know what's going to happen in a good way. You'll find something delicious and meet someone interesting. It's a very fun place. Excellent.
Elise Ballard
0:36:47
Well, Elise, thank you so much for your time and I'll see you dancing soon, I'm sure. Yes, I'll see you dancing. Thank you, Elise.
Chris Pfeifle
0:36:55
Thank you, Chris.
Chris Pfeifle
0:36:56
Thank you, Elise.
Elise DiFiore
0:36:57
Really glad to talk with you.
Elise Ballard
0:37:04
The Umami Podcast is produced by T&E Networks. Find us anywhere you get podcasts and on Instagram at theumamipodcast. Find us anywhere you get podcasts and on Instagram @umamipodcaster.