Milwaukee, "a rich beautiful land"

    My relationship to gardening started in Hawaii thanks to amazing women who I admire and who have inspired this journey. During six years living in Hawaii, I ate and enjoyed a diversity of exotic and tropical species that I want to grow in our urban food forest. During one of my father- in-law's visits to Hawaii, he ate a papaya and randomly spread the seeds in our backyard. Those papaya trees yielded delicious fruit, and they flourished season after season, the harvest came to be known as “The Fruit of Our Love”. The papayas were only seeds and by the time we harvested the fruit, my husband and I had been married, added a puppy to our growing family, bought our first home and propagated those seeds.  

Gardening has not only been a significant part of our life, but it has helped our family to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, amidst one of the most chaotic times in recent human history, we helped our father-in-law expand his backyard garden. Experiencing the outdoors and touching the soil beneath undoubtedly provided a healing experience. At Casa Holo Holo, we want to empower women and girls to start their own urban food forest by providing resources on our blog.

LAND 

     Casa Holo Holo is an urban food forest located in just about 0.5 acres in Brevard County, Florida. We want to properly honor the land of those who inhabited the land before us, this territory once belonged to the Ais tribe and the Timacua nation, who lived in harmony with nature. Just as our ancestors did, we seek to minimize deforestation for agriculture purposes and observe carefully how crops interact with each other. Connecting with local and indigenous knowledge would be the first step in finding crop varieties that have been grown in the area by our ancestors. Learning about your land and understanding the connections that exist between humans and food helps guide our crop choices. Once you understand who sowed the seeds on this land, long before you did then you realize that we must incorporate traditional knowledge to achieve sustainable agriculture and food production.

     We currently have the following edible crops: banana, papaya, pineapple, American beautyberry, Christmas loquat, strawberry guava, carambola, various herbs such as rosemary, basil, culantro, cilantro. Wildflowers such as Firebush, Perennial Peanut and Creeping Oxeye. There are many native ferns, Saw palmetto, Cabbage palms, cranberry hibiscus, which can be sold to create additional revenue streams as ornamental plants.  Agroforestry was implemented when the property was developed in the late 1980s.  There are ten laurel oaks, and we are surrounded by at least a dozen native pine trees such as sand pine and loblolly pine. Full plant list to follow in a separate post.  

WHAT WE DO 

    We focus on designing human ecosystems that support psychological wellbeing, improved physical health, increased cognitive function and productivity.  Human ecosystems are designs of living spaces that improve the connection between humans and the conservation of our natural environment by reducing our carbon footprint, increasing food security, and encouraging biodiversity.  Connection to nature and experiencing the outdoors has healing effects on our body and soul.   Designing our cities, neighborhoods, homes and workspaces with these principles will help preserve our sanity with the new generation of employers offering remote working opportunities.

Our soil is Earths biggest carbon sink, and you can harness its power to fight climate change by using no till principles and regenerative practices. We help increase the soil organic matter on your property through various strategies such as sheeting mulching, no-till, cover crops, adding mulch to exposed or bare soil, and amending with compost when needed. Choosing the right species to grow in your garden varies on multiple factors such as hardiness zone, soil type and drainage, weather and climate patterns, hydrography, topography and more. We believe that water resources must be used wisely, using methods such as smart irrigation practices and rainwater harvesting methods.   Human ecosystems must be designed with conservation in mind to change the way we interact with the ecosystems we inhabit.

We offer consulting services for site design and urban garden planning using biophilic and permaculture design principles, if you are interested contact us at info@holoholoprojects.com.