May Updates

Hello everyone! 

We hope everyone is enjoying the (mostly) warm days. We’ve had an exciting month as we begin our growing season. The trees look healthy and happy and have gotten so big! We’re looking forward to seeing what fruit they produce this year – this is the first year we haven’t trimmed their buds. 

During our growing season, we will have plenty of opportunities to stop by. As a reminder, our food forest is free and open to the public, so stop by toand grab some green onions and admire our growing saplings!. Come June and July, we’ll also have some berries and cherries to share. More food forest updates below. 

As a reminder, this winter, our intern Grace helped us to expand our network through social media. We are grateful for her work making us our very own Instagram and Facebook pages - follow us for more updates and pictures!

If you’re new here…

Welcome! We are Phoenix Farms, a small nonprofit organization that maintains a food forest in Woodlawn. We’ve been operating for a few years now on God’s Little Acre (a lot on 64th and Kimbark), in partnership with First Presbyterian Church.  

Phoenix Farms seeks to promote access to fresh, sustainably-grown fruits and vegetables for our local community. Our food forest is open to the public, and we encourage everyone to pick and eat our produce completely free and at any time. Produce not picked by our community is donated to First Presbyterian’s Free Food Market. More about the folks running the organization can be found here.

Food Forest Updates

We had a productive April, thanks to a tip from one of our newsletters readers! A reader emailed us to share that the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Extension Program was giving away free native saplings. We were thrilled to add two new little saplings to the forest - an American Hazelnut, and an eElderberry. They are both shrubs and will grow to less than 10 feet tall – . Aand they’ll both produce delicious edibles, once they’ve taken a few years to grow big and strong. Thank you to our neighbor who flagged this opportunity!

Additionally, we hosted a Spring workday to plant the saplings, re-mulch our trees, and do some weeding. It was great to see both new and returning faces, and we’re looking forward to hosting another one soon.  

This month we will focus on making sure our young saplings get enough water, keeping weeds at and bay, and checking on our trees and berry bushes. More info on another work day coming soon. 

Volunteer Corner

  • Another work day is coming soon! Keep an eye out for more information.

  • If you are walking by the food forest and notice something amiss, let us know! We appreciate your help keeping an eye on our space.

Community News & Happenings

  • The Free Food Market at our neighbor First Presbyterian is open on Thursdays from 10am-12pm. 

  • The 57th Street Art Fair is June 6-7 and will feature free kids activities at Hyde Park Neighborhood Club and the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures.