Joining Forces with Echoing Hope Ranch

Written by Carol Manetta, Executive Director

Today we can announce a partnership with yet another brave organization to take an uncharted road with us at Reap Goodness. Taking the high road is Echoing Hope Ranch of Hereford, Arizona, USA. This good organization supports adults for needed care on their former vacation-ranch site. They have promised to care for the public food forest that Reap Goodness is to develop in the nearby city of Sierra Vista, Arizona, USA.

This public food forest will be cared for by Echoing Hope Ranch residents and their supportive staff for 10 years after the first year of planting by Reap Goodness volunteers. Those initial volunteers will be residents from Sierra Vista and surrounding communities. Its site is in what is deemed a food desert location in an urban area on the west side of the city. It comprises two city home lots that are conveniently located in a flash flood zone. Those flood waters will be captured with water harvesting earth mounds, swales (water capturing ditches) and other earthworks that will slow down the rainwater to sink it in the ground instead of rushing away to evaporate later.

The fruit trees, berry bushes and smaller perennial food plants will be selected by nearby neighbors who will choose what plants they would like to harvest most. Then, Reap Goodness volunteers will plan which activities should be taken; first, second, and so on to complete the fenced-in food forest that will be always open to the public.

Later, the good folks at Echoing Hope Ranch will arrive to maintain the food forest after at least a full year of plant establishment by the original volunteers. As certain plants begin to multiply, the Echoing Hope Ranch residents will be able to take the excess plants to their own property to have more food plants there. Everyone benefits!

Can you see this good model as one that can be replicated all over the Earth?

Imagine it.