Charlotte’s Blueberry Park Expands Its Food Forest for Local Families

Charlotte’s Blueberry Park on Tacoma’s southeast side is rooted in berry-pickin’ fun, but the coveted urban greenspace is shaping up to offer more fresh foods folks can forage for free each year. (Now try saying that ten times fast.)

This year, a $171,000 state grant funded the work to nearly double the park’s food forest supply with a growth model where — rather than planting rows of crops — trees, vines, groundcover and shrubs are all planted in layers designed to work together as a self-sustaining, edible ecosystem.

What families can expect to find at the food forest

The newly planted items include pomegranates, guava, marigolds, figs, almonds, hazelnuts and even mandarin oranges. That’s on top of what the park has already done with its more than 3,000 blueberry bushes, with five varieties ripening from July to September.

The grant’s work can also be seen in recycled concrete landscape beds installed on the walkway to the playground. They’ve been filled with starts and seeds for veggies and herbs.

In total, the food forest now includes:

• 27 types of trees, including plum, cherry, persimmon, fig, apple and pear
• 17 types of fruit shrubs, including gooseberry and guava
• 31 types of perennial vegetables and herbs
• Pollinator-friendly flowers, such as marigolds
• Medicinal plants, including willow bark

The grant also funded a study session with local cultural gardening groups representing Mexican, Vietnamese, Cambodian and Black African diaspora residents. Many of those families live in the neighborhoods around the park. The goal was to see what kinds of culturally significant fruits and vegetables would best serve those families if they could be grown for free, not too far from their houses. Among the suggestions are the above-mentioned medicinal plants. Very cool!

Like the berries, the new food forest plantings are first come, first served, but always free. Parks Tacoma doesn’t use pesticides or fertilizers on the berry bushes, so picking is perfect for little hands. In fact, studies show that 3,600 residents are served by the park overall, 900 of whom are children who live within walking distance.

While the new offerings aren’t quite the bounty they could be later in the year, visitors may delight in the site’s rich history, or learn about mason bees from the various informative signage. But if they’re anything like my kids, they probably want to dash down the slide at the playground.

The history of Charlotte’s Blueberry Park

Once upon a time, row after row of blueberry bushes took root in the rich peat soil of Tacoma’s east side. A collective mass of woody stems, soft green leaves and bell-shaped flowers, the grove bore fruit each summer while the city of Tacoma grew up around them. Today, the orchard is surprisingly large among the neighborhood houses and is bounded by several busy streets bustling with city life.

Lars Berg operated the blueberry farm with his family back in the 1950s and ‘60s. In August 1964, Berg spoke to the Tacoma News Tribune about a late-ripening season, giving a glimpse into the quiet legacy of the grower, who passed away the following year. The property was sold to a Tacoma school district in 1968.

Decades later, Parks Tacoma took over the property. The park it became was named after the late Charlotte Valbert, a local hero and lifetime East Tacoma resident who led the years-long volunteer effort to preserve the old farm site for a community park.

Valbert organized neighborhood work parties to clear overgrowth from the site’s thick tangle of Scotch broom, ivy and prickly blackberry vines. She encouraged children to venture out using the buddy system to pick up trash from its far corners. At one point, when she was 78 years old, news reports said she got approval to bring a herd of 28 goats in to munch down the excessive brush for five straight days. Later, when the site became an official park, complete with neat rows of clean blueberry bushes, Valbert secured grants and coordinated nearly 400 local residents who helped maintain the park each year.

In 2002, one of Valbert’s many volunteers told the Tacoma News Tribune that he was motivated not by berries but by the desire to improve the neighborhood. The overgrown former blueberry farm was an eyesore, he said, and it felt like an unsafe place people had been avoiding for years. Determined to change that, he began clearing brush alongside Valbert, often involving other volunteer groups, scouts, and friends to help. “You don’t just wait for something to happen,” he told the newspaper. “You have to get involved.”

What our day was like

For our part as first-time visitors to Charlotte’s Blueberry Park, we made a full day out of it. My kids bounced between the playground and towering bushes, not quite in the fruiting stage just yet. They followed butterflies and peeked under leaves. Even though there wasn’t anything ripe enough to pick, we could see the start of the food forest vision that organizers set in motion this spring. My husband, Bowen, who usually gets dragged into my “fun family outing” ideas with mild skepticism, ended up pretty impressed with the property’s variety of plants.

The plantings were clearly labeled, and signs of new life popped in gentle sprigs of green from beneath small mounds of fresh bark chips. Bowen and I were also surprised at the sheer size of the berry bushes — some more than 6 feet tall. Overall, we appreciated the food forest concept and its bridge to nature — a gentle way to nudge families like us out the door more often in increasingly busy, screen-filled lives.

Room to play and explore

There was something uniquely magical about the kids playing hide-and-seek in the grove. Small hints of their childhood fun were more heard than seen between the crop rows: a streak of heathered grey from my son’s T-shirt as he dashed between the bushes, and the sound of both kids’ laughter traveling together on the breeze. These small but impactful moments reminded me of how nice a day outside can be.

That said, the distant sound of happy children floating up from somewhere behind a wall of vegetation is the very thing I was so not into five years ago when the kids were smaller. Because there’s nothing scarier than losing sight of littles, even in nature, for more than five seconds. Super cool nature, in this case, but potentially nerve-rattling nonetheless. Luckily, at ages 9 and 11, I felt OK with our kiddos playing mostly out of sight — but still within earshot for them to return when I called them back.

Learning more about pollinators in the garden

There were a ton of bees when we visited in early May during the orchard’s flowering stage. The buzz, buzz, buzz of little bees always makes me a bit nervous around kids because, like any good child of the ‘90s, I was an avid moviegoer. And it’s hard to forget the utter tragedy of “My Girl,” where Macaulay Culkin and Anna Chlumsky’s characters taught us that nothing good comes from accidentally stumbling upon a swath of angry honeybees.

But never fear — several signs around the park highlight the work of small, black mason bees that live there. Unlike honeybees, these little pollinating powerhouses rarely sting and prefer to work solo. Since they don’t have a hive or queen to protect, they aren’t aggressive while they quietly help nature do its thing by making sure the fruit trees and berry bushes stay bursting with goodness each summer. Even still, the number of little buzzing creatures all around still served as a good reminder for the kiddos to be gentle around the plants, keep an eye on their surroundings and be respectful toward other living things.

The park signage also talks about several mason bee houses visitors can spot around the property. The habitats look like small boxes with rows of wooden straws stacked inside. Female mason bees love to pop their individual eggs into these linear caves as little one-room nurseries, complete with the pollen they collect for their baby bees to eat once they hatch. Before a female mason bee leaves her small round cave, she walls off its opening using mud as a seal. My kids found one of these houses, which they reported back to us as being a beehive. Curious, I made the mega-rare move to — dun dun dun! — give my 11-year-old daughter my almost-sorta brand-new iPhone to take video of “the hive” back through the depths of the orchard rows. (The video turned out cute, even!)

The playground and other features of the park

Completed in 2019, the playground is located on the park’s north end, in a 3,600-square-foot play area designed with the natural environment in mind. It features climbing structures, balance beams, musical elements and an elevated lookout that lets kids peek over the blueberry bushes. I loved how the colors of light green and natural wood helped blend the playset with the surrounding trees, paths and grasses. There’s even the aforementioned mason bee display around the corner — perfect for curious littles.

Next to the playground, a fenced-in community garden opened in 2018 as part of grant funding that brought seven cooperative gardens to Tacoma. The community garden isn’t open for public picking. Instead, about 20 local gardeners share the in-ground and raised planter beds, growing their own crops like kale, carrots and beets.

With 10 acres of wetlands and lots of open meadow, the park never felt crowded. Lots of picnic tables and benches make this park a great spot to settle in for a snack or lunch break.

Editor’s note: Charlotte’s Blueberry Park is a beloved community spot according to many local families. However, some safety concerns have been brought to our attention from online reviews and anecdotal experiences. We encourage families to take the usual safety precautions when visiting.