Auburn Permaculture Park

Auburn Permaculture Park is an edible forest garden and educational gathering space located at Michael Lepak Memorial Park in Auburn, New York.

Auburn Permaculture Park is a multi-generational, educational gathering space that inspires people to celebrate community and build a relationship with nature through exploration and play. The park provides a welcoming and accessible oasis of abundance and diversity, a serene place to unwind and reconnect, and a place for personal and perennial cultivation and growth. The low-cost, low-maintenance park serves as a symbol of community-empowerment and as a reproducible model for regenerating urban lands with edible forest ecosystems.

This project uses permaculture design principles to build living soil, harvest rainwater in the landscape, and cultivate a perennial based food system. By replacing resource intensive lawn with edible forest gardens and installing food forests in public parks and along public pathways, we can make fresh fruits, nuts, and vegetables abundant and available for everyone. Auburn Permaculture Park will bring our community together by fostering a resilient approach to urban food production and land stewardship.

Auburn Permaculture Park seeks to grow food security using permaculture design. Permaculture is an ethical and ecological design system for creating regenerative human environments. It is an integrated system of ethics, principles and design methods that can be used to create landscapes (as well as buildings and systems) that are modeled and patterned after nature. It is the careful design of beneficial ecological relationships to create an efficient, healthy sustainable whole, with less energy input and more abundant results. Forest Gardening is a gardening system that mimics a natural woodland environment that is self-watering, self-weeding, self-mulching, self-fertilizing and highly productive with little to no maintenance.