Community members and enthusiastic volunteers gathered at McCauley Community Orchard on September 21st to plant 1000 perennials.

This large scale community planting project was supported by the contributions of Foresters (a Life Insurance Company that looks to give back to its community through projects like food forests) and 5th World (a company that designs and builds regenerative properties, from food forests to passive solar greenhouses).

The Orchard has been under the stewardship of Sustainable Food Edmonton for the last couple of years, building on the work of Operation Fruit Rescue and supporting neighbourhood volunteers and organisations in their participation. The purpose of building an understory of native plants is to create more habitat for pollinators and increase biodiversity.  My neighbour Reuben Quinn shared a Cree word: manicos (pronounced mah-nee-chos): “insects are little creators.“

People can support these little creators by planting species that give them homes and allow them to do their work.

The 5th World regenerative agriculture folks designed the understory with the manicos in mind. Each species of plant provides some food or shelter for the small creators.The variety of plants chosen will provide blooms from May through October, attracting a variety of pollinators and beneficial insects.  

As fall and winter arrive, the perennials will be dormant and revive again in the spring.   

Patty Milligan, the Agriculture Educator at the Edmonton Urban Farm, explains what these pollinators do. 

Insects, especially bees, love to visit the flowers of plants, usually to eat nectar. While they are sipping that sweet liquid, they will get pollen grains on their bodies that they then carry to another flower. Bees have special hairs and other structures on their bodies specifically for carrying the pollen. Bees pick up pollen on purpose because they need it to feed it to their larvae (babies).

The pollen grains they carry to another flower will fertilise that flower and enable seeds to develop. If it’s a fruit or a berry, a fleshy material will form around the seeds that humans can pick and then eat.

If it’s a vegetable, the seeds will form and they can be harvested by humans and used to plant and grow vegetables next year.

There is an intricate and valuable dance between bees, flowers, and humans which enables bees to feed themselves and their babies, flowers to reproduce and create seeds, and humans—and other creatures—to eat fruits and vegetables!

Gail recently moved back to McCauley after living in Delton.