 Hello dear friends, this is Ramona Brayboy, and this is Robin Greenfield, and we're building a food forest on the Deuces. So why does a food forest in the Deuces matter? All of South St. Petersburg is considered food insecure, that means there's low income, low vehicle access, and low access to nutritious foods. So if we can grow our own food, then we're not dependent on the grocery store, and we can also build up our community and ourselves. There is an incredible revitalization of community here happening in the Deuces. I'm so grateful to be a part of what Ramona's building up, and so excited to help this food forest build up the community. So we're going to share with you how we're building up the food forest, because we want to see food forest like this popping up in a community's all over. First step is bringing out the community, starting off with cleanups, weeding, mulching, applying soil, plantings, and just getting to know each other. So my family owns this lot, and it's a lovely opportunity because we don't have to worry about anyone telling us what we can and cannot do on in space. There's a lot of power and ownership. Now if you don't own, there's all sorts of creative ways to access land. When we first started cleaning up this space, you would have thought that there were unknown raves going on, because there would be whole bottles of liquor, clothes, and all sorts of big pieces of trash and broken glass. But now it is obviously much cleaner and safer place to clean up. So it took a lot of clean up. Yes. There's tons of trash, thanks to organizations giving us trash pickers, safety gloves, and vests so that we didn't have to worry about getting harmed in the process. So after we adopted the community of keeping Pinellas beautiful, the next step was mulch. Over six months ago, we had 30 yards of mulch, and you can see it's gone down significantly. Thanks to Jerry Rigger's Crane and Tree Service, we've got another 30 yards to lay down. So yeah, you can see here the grass, and the purpose of the mulch is to suppress the grass, kill it, so you can create your food for us. The mulch also acts as a sponge holding in the rain, holding in the moisture. It breaks down and turns into soil to build up fertility to grow food with. It creates a network where you can have fungi growing, connecting the plants, and you've got bacteria. You've got different critters, microorganisms, and macroorganisms, and you've got a whole thriving community that comes together, and mulch is a big part of that foundation. So water. Water. We're going to talk about our water journey. Essentially, I started off filling up one gallon water jugs at my house with a hose, filling them up about eight of them at least, loading it in my car, and hand watering the plants to keep it successful. Just arriving, we've graduated, and we've got water totes now. So yeah, the design here is basically these 275 gallon totes. They're excellent. You can use them for rainwater harvesting, but what we're doing is we're just filling them with trucks for now. So to start, we need this water to get this food for us established, but we're designing with the easy to grow plants that can thrive with less water. So it was a real challenge having to water the bottles at my house. So thanks to the Wellness Center, with making opportunities materialize, we've been able to fill the totes with people who are willing to bring their trucks. So we are here with the mulberry tree, which is so amazing. One of the first trees that we planted here over a year ago, and it has survived, even without much care. Yeah, so speaking of surviving the plants, what we're choosing is the easiest to grow and most abundant plants. We've selected about 30 different plants that require the least water, the least care, the least fertility, and have the fewest insects that eat them. So culturally rep, relevant foods are very important as well because we want to provide foods that people are already interested in, that they're already consuming on a regular basis, so that we can pull them in on that side so they can learn about other plants that they've never encountered before. Yeah, just like 10 minutes ago, a woman from Puerto Rico is stopping by and she was like, oh, you got to go and eat the oregano, the Cuban oregano. Yeah, pumpkin. Papaya, she knew all of it. It was beautiful to see just someone passing by. Yes, it's definitely sparking the interest and the community has let me know over the past couple of days that they fully approve and support this mission. So yeah, there's moringa, there's chaya, there's papaya. Water-paper plant, edible cactus, lemongrass, rosemary, sorrel. Did we mention yucca? Age, so we've got quite a variety. Okay, so on this slide, we have a lot of sand, lots of ants and little weeds. As you know, Florida was under water at one point, so thanks to the University of Florida, we've got donated some really great soil, aka compost. Yeah, so when you start here in Florida, we're literally starting with sand. It's more or less a beach in a way. So as Ramona said, we've got some soil here and some soil is key for getting started. But what we really want to do is let the plants build most of our soil for us. Of course, the mulch does a lot of that. So by starting this food forest, we're building up the ground cover. We're building up the canopy and that's gonna allow for soil to build over time. So it's gonna take some time, but we're gonna let the plants do the majority of the work of building up this food for us. So we've got the foundation of the food forest set. The community has been built and come together. We've laid the cardboard, we've planted about 30 of the easiest to grow plants, we've got our water in place. How are you feeling? I'm feeling super grateful and amazed by the generosity of strangers and friends. Yeah, and I'm just feeling just, I'm hopeful, I'm excited. I mean, I'm just imagining in a year's time or so, this being a thriving food forest where next time you see us, we'll do another video in a year. We'll be like hiding in this food forest. So we gotta give a shout out to all of the lovely people that donated. Starting with Caleb Plade and Regenerative Shift, community members right here on this block. Little Tree Homestead Nursery, Urban Harvest, LLC, Sustainable Urban Agricultural Coalition. Ideas for us and so many more. Of course, Earth Song. I mean, people have just been coming out of the woodworks. Amazing people like Whitney Lane, Veronica Kowlenskis, Abel, Joyce Woodson, Lisa Panada, Hilary Miller, and them all. We invite you to come out and support this food forest. This is a community effort. Any day of the week, you can come out and clean, weed, mulch, water, or contribute more plant. And just learn how to take care of these plants so you can do the same thing in your home, in your community. So this is 14th Ab South and 22nd Street, the deuces here in South St. Pete's. So people can literally just come on, drive by and check it out, right? Yeah, you can walk up. There's no security codes. We'll all are welcome. So if you want to support Ramona and the Deuces Food Forest, and if you want to follow along, you can follow her on Facebook. Sunshine Fresh Market, formerly known as Southside Fresh Market. And the Deuces Food Forest, Ramona Elizabeth on Facebook. And we'll have all the links in the description below for that. Yes. And of course, one of the things that we're doing here is we're showing the demonstration for what we've created, the Food Forest Starter Bundle, which is a bundle of 30 of the easiest to grow foods in Florida that you can get from us on a suggested donation basis. So you can start a food forest like this in your community. We also provide them at no cost to communities who are helping to really build up the community. So I'll be back in less than a year. And you'll see a video of Ramona and I right here. Make sure you follow along with Ramona every day, every week, every month, and every day. Follow the journey.