From the Field: The Overlap Between Productive and Wild Spaces

From the Field: The Overlap Between Productive and Wild Spaces

* Our “From the Field” Series features projects, production, and reflections derived from our work at home on our two farm sites in near Frenchtown, New Jersey.*

There is often the opportunity for overlap between productive and wild spaces. The best designs are guided by observations we can make about the way the world around us behaves.

One of the most compacted areas of the farm are the constructed pond edges, and for the most part we’ve allowed natural succession to unfold with plantain and grasses giving way to cattails and wet meadow wildflowers and sedges.

But, we’ve also been slowly building out a productive fruit crop of aronia berry around our ponds. Aronia is ecologically a “pioneer” species, able to grow in a wide range of disturbed soil types including heavy compaction, and tolerates the spectrum between inundation and drought. Here its perennial root structure helps to stabilize the soil next to this small body of water, and overtime will spread in colonial formation providing further structural integrity around these constructed depression ponds.

We’re always looking to enhance the edge space both literally and figuratively. On our farm production happens between the diverse interplay of naturalized habitats, here ecological restoration overlaps with agricultural production.

Photo: South field pond edge, July 2018