Edible landscapes expanding in Iowa City

IOWA CITY - An effort to plant food in Iowa City's public spaces is expanding.

Backyard Abundance, an Iowa City non-profit focused on education about environmentally beneficial landscape design, is working with the Iowa City Parks and Recreation Department and Creekside neighbors to establish an 'edible landscape” in Creekside Park.

An 'edible classroom” also is planned at the Robert A. Lee Recreation Center.

Creekside Park is a 2.3-acre park just off Muscatine Avenue in southeast Iowa City. With help from a Program for Improving Neighborhoods grant from the city of Iowa City, Backyard Abundance and neighborhood volunteers plan to establish three new garden landscapes there.

One will be the edible landscape. Like another such project Backyard Abundance implemented at Iowa City's Wetherby Park, the garden will feature fruit trees and bushes, herbs and other food plants such as strawberries and rhubarb. The elements are designed to work together, with plants that complement each other in a low-maintenance space.

Anyone can then pick and eat the food, free of charge.

Including Creekside Park, Backyard Abundance has designed five edible landscapes around Iowa City, including one in the Children's Discovery Garden on the north side of the Robert A. Lee Recreation Center.

Now it will add an outdoor edible classroom on the recreation center's south side, with funding from an Iowa Department of Agriculture grant.

'If people want to learn how to actually implement edible landscapes, they can come to this space,” Backyard Abundance director Frey Meyer said.

He said the Iowa City Parks and Recreation Department will be able to hold classes there, as will other members of the public. People could reserve the outdoor room the same way other public spaces are reserved.

Backyard Abundance will host a community meeting this winter to collect ideas from the public on what they'd like to see in the space. One of the challenges with edible landscapes, Meyer said, is that people don't realize they can harvest the food and they often don't know what to do with the plants if they do pick them.

So Backyard Abundance is currently raising funds to install landscape signs. The signs will explain the food is available to all and also would identify each plant. A QR code on each sign would let people with smartphones scan the sign to get more information on the plant's uses, recipes and other details.

Creekside Park will see two other new garden spaces in the coming year, also designed by Backyard Abundance.

A 'fairy garden,” with tall ferns and buried stumps for children to explore, is in the works, and a portion of the park along Muscatine Road is being considered for native prairie, which would act as a buffer from the road.

This fall, volunteers worked to mulch garden beds for the efforts. Creekside resident Amy Blessing, a master gardener, helped spearhead the efforts, which came together through conversations between neighbors and a neighborhood Facebook group.

'I'd like to see more use of that land, to kind of beautify it,” Blessing said. 'I like that we're going to enhance the play area and make a natural area for kids to play in.”