“Yummy” was the word of the day at the BLAST Regional Meeting Saturday November 5th in Springfield, Massachusetts. Gardening the Community hosted the meeting and created an extraordinary day full of new knowledge and enthusiasm around food systems work.

And although our work focuses around a lot of “yummy” food, there was a new yummy taste that was added at the BLAST Regional Meeting. It was the taste of some amazing perennial plants that bear incredibly sweet and savory fruits that are ripe and ready for the taking.

Jonathan Bates, Kristin Brennan and the rest of the staff at Gardening the Community presented an idea called the Edible Forest Garden. This type of gardening is a way for us to produce food in a way that is more inline with nature, even more so than sustainable agriculture.

After we learned a bit about this concept and got familiar with some very “yummy” perennial plants, we put our new knowledge into action and helped GtC create a perennial landscape for their garden.

The most “yummy” experience was after lunch at Tripple Brook Farm Nursery in Southampton, MA. This nursery is filled with some incredible plants, including pine nut trees, banana trees (and not in a green house), American Persimmon trees, bamboo, and a variety of other trees that can be eaten and can be a great addition to an annual garden or farm. We tried many of the fruits and found many of them to taste like custard. I never thought the forest would taste like custard.

We also visited Bashista Apple Orchard and saw apple cider being pressed and bottled. Afterward, we bought lots of “yummy” apple products including cider and donuts.

Overall, a very “yummy” day.

Here are some pictures: