Love Eternal is a Santa Cruz based band that has offered their support for Common Vision since its beginning. Recently they released this song "Common Vision" and have been distributing the single free-of-charge to help inspire their community to rise up to the challenge of caring for the earth and each other.
The bus has a brand new bamboo floor. The transformation from cold-hard-steel-tube to warm, soft, earth-educator, home-and-transport has begun. The trick with bamboo floor (unlike interpersonal communication and foreign policy) is to not be afraid to pound it into submission with a large rubber mallet. I should also mention that despite what it says on our homepage, I am not building this bus alone. AnnaPurna and the great Stephen England are in the shop everyday building, bracketing, bracing, and babbling. They deserve your and my appreciation. I will of course be happy to forward all letters of appreciation (or antagonism) to them.
Common Vision is preparing to give the world’s largest recycled-vegetable-oil-powered fleet a fresh paint job for what promises to be the most powerful Fruit Tree Tour yet. The Vision needs your help for concept sketches, murals, portraits, general touch-up. If you are an artist or know of any artists who may be interested in giving creative energies to help forward the murals that thousands of California’s students will see, contact Blair Phillips: (stillwater@commonvision.org). Painting will happen in Santa Rosa.
• A fully realized Green City covered in fruit trees, urban gardens, solar panels, alternative transportation, passive solar design, alternative construction, and energy alternatives.
Painting projects on murals of “Lioness” and “Bassi” include:
After 913 miles of open road, the yet to be named bus and I arrived today at our shop in Santa Rosa and I began removing the original Greyhound bathroom... Yuck! The bus ran great the entire way from Tucscon at 70 miles per hour. It's December 12, and we've got fifty-two days until Fruit Tree Tour begins. So, as we say in the business, "Let's do 'dis"
With Common Vision’s new bus on the way, Pre-tour Prep has officially begun! This time of year is special for the CV crew because we start witnessing miracle after miracle roll in! The time, energy and resources needed for Fruit Tree Tour to be the educational extravoganza that it turns into each year come in many different forms. One of the most exciting is …..Fruit Trees! This week CV received the first two tree donations for FTT 08.
The California Rare Fruit Growers is an inspiring organization that over the past three years has played a pivotal role in the Fruit Tree Tour. The organization is an eclectic group of hobbyists, backyard growers, government and university researchers, nurserymen and commercial growers that focus on growing fruit varieties that are not commonly grown commercially. They have been instrumental in diversifying the fruit varieties that Common Vision plants at the schools and extending the number of months that students can pick fruit from trees in their schoolyard.
Here are some of the key Rare Fruit Growers who have made a substantial contribution to the project to date:
Joe Sabol of the Central Coast CRFG chapter has run a High School Grafting Program where every spring he teaches students at 30 schools across the central coast to graft there own apple trees. This program has helped over 10,000 students to graft trees since 1998. This year he will be running a workshop for the Fruit Tree Tour crew to increase the crew’s grafting and teaching capacity for the Roots-to-Fruits Program.
On a rainy Monday in Ukiah your beloved alternative energy specialist is about to do something some of you may deem insane. Today, I committed to picking up a bus that I have never seen or driven. You may try to stop me with your phone calls and emails but the fat is in the fire. Stay tuned for updates from the conversion shop.
In the first years of this great decade, “biodiesel” was by no means a well known fuel option. Common Vision’s beloved founder Blair Philips searched far and wide to find someone to teach the organization how to make this mythical vegetable oil fuel. In the far reaches of the Big Island of Hawaii he found he found just this mad scientist and brought this information back to the mainland. Common Vision built a reactor out of a 55 gallon drum, three cinder blocks, a propane cook stove, and an old trolling boat motor and got to work engaging the alchemy of biofuel.
In 2002, Common traveled across America, teaching community workshops on how to brew Bio-diesel from recycled vegetable oil and create local biodiesel Co-ops in 20 cities including Los Angeles, Phoenix, Detroit, and New York City. With a volunteer crew of 10 and a mobile Biodiesel refinery, Common Vision brewed over 1500 gallons of Biodiesel fueling the entire 7,000+ mile journey.
My name is Pranav, and I am one of the Common Vision Fruit Tree Tour Drum Circle facilitators. As a lover of drums and drumming, it is a honor for me to serve the youth as a teacher of drumming concepts and techniques this year on Fruit Tree Tour. I thank all of the West African drum masters who have touched my life as a drummer, and also Common Vision's legendary drumming crew of this year and of yesteryear.
With games and rhythm lessons, students learn to play together while creating a unified song on the drums. In addition to the drumming patterns involved in West African traditional music there are also dances and singing parts. Dancing to the rhythms is also taught at many of the groups. When it's at its best, the drumming and dancing comes together at the end of the session to create a group celebration that is unifying, fun and exciting.
We usually start off with a drum & dance demonstration and introductions. We introduce ourselves and the drums that we are bringing to the group. These are djembe drums, which are a west African style of hand drums, made with goat skin and wood. There are also a set of 3 dunun drums, which are traditionally played to accompany the djembes. The dununs are played with sticks by our facilitators and are made from thicker cow skins. 
Fruit Tree Tour 2008 is coming soon! Common Vision would love your help in designing a new 2008 crew T-shirt for our volunteers and supporting friends. Details are below this brief look at the history of the Common Vision logo.
When Zak Human of Woven Media completed the direction and production of the Common Vision documentary “Planting the Vision,” he surprised the whole staff with his amazing graphic design talent. He designed the art work on the DVD sleeve including the “Every Leaf is Our Flag” emblem and the cartoon image of the beloved Lioness, Common Vision’s eldest bus.
So who’s next? 2008 will be the fifth annual Fruit Tree Tour bringing at least another 1000 fruit trees, rhythm after rhythm, and high vibes eco-hip-hop to California’s youth. Your ideas and (especially) your artwork would be greatly appreciated! CV will feature the selected design and artist on Benefit tour as well as in the first on tour issue of Harvest Rhythm. Fruit Tree Tour crew will plant a tree in honor of you or the friend of your choice. And of course, a 100% organic cotton/hemp shirt for the artist!
Blair Phillips founded Common Vision to help solve today’s environmental problems by integrating old and new cultural practices that connect people and communities to the Earth. For the past 8 years Blair has been studying West African agricultural rhythms, drumming for youth in performances, and using the drum as a tool to teach about ecology, farming, and community. This winter Blair journeyed through Africa from the dry land tropics of Mali to the humid coast of Conakry, Guinea to deepen his study and develop the group’s presentation of the relationship between music and farming.
Two agricultural rhythms Blair encountered in his study were Konkobas and Kassa. Dances from African traditional villages mimic everyday movements like pumping water and harvesting millet. Konkobas was the original farming rhythm: it came from the Malinka words kon kon bas translated to ‘big, big hungry.’ These words became ‘Konkobas’ the ancient ancestor spirit of the strongest and hardest-working farmer.
Later, when villagers needed to increase production to meet the needs of colonial powers and to feed an expanding population, the rhythm
Kassa was born. Kassa means, “You MUST farm.”
In Guinea, drums accompany farming work parties. Drummers and farmers work together in ceremony to accomplish large, important farming projects such as clearing fields and harvesting. Fruit Tree Tour offers youth a chance to engage in this ancient tradition of farming with rhythms. Both Konkoba and Kassa are featured in this year’s Fruit Tree Tour drum and dance performance. During community plantings students, parents, and community members have the opportunity to dig and plant to these rhythms.
We hope sharing these ancient cultural traditions helps map out how we are all interconnected with each other and with the earth, inspiring us all to work hard for a better future as one human family.
Fruit Tree Tour was born when Los Angeles based nonprofit TreePeople gifted 100 fruit trees to Common Vision as part of their Fruit Trees to Combat Hunger program. Tree People have now been a vital part of 4 years of Fruit Tree Tour. TreePeople donates up to 80 percent of the fruit trees planted in Los Angeles during Fruit Tree Tour each year. This year, Common Vision will contribute 200 tree plantings towards Tree Peoples 300,000 tree pledge for the Million Tree LA initiative.
How does Common Vision’s veggie-oil powered caravan carry 1,000 fruit trees for 3 months? Bare-rooted, dormant, cold, and moist in a 20’ long vegetable-oil powered refrigerator on wheels, of course… Taking proper care of all these trees while on the road is no small task. Fruit Tree Tour volunteer Brenda Whitney has taken on the responsibility with ceaseless dedication for the past two years. Our beloved Tree Steward now reveals to the world what caring for all these trees entails.
The job is a quiet, behind the scenes, daily commitment that requires watering the trees morning and night, as well as pulling out a school's "order" for trees to be planted during the next day's program. Thankfully it can be done alone, or together, any time of day or night, and can be a peaceful meditation. Sometimes it requires driving with Maggie, one of the crew's original Tree Stewards, in the refrigerator truck to pick up trees being donated by a nursery. It is always exciting to see where our trees come from, and meet the people who are giving them to Common Vision for the Fruit Tree Tour schools. It's a joy to see the inside of the truck filled with another 50-300 trees waiting to be planted at schools.
On February 28th, Common Vision brought Fruit Tree Tour to an LA Koreatown school, Charles H Kim Elementary, under very special circumstances. Charles H Kim, after whom the school was named, was a nectarine farmer and fruit packer in Los Angeles in the early 1900’s. Common Vision sourced some of the nectarine varieties that Charles Kim grew and planted them with the students on the campus.
Planting the Vision is a 45 minute documentary about Fruit Tree Tour. Zak Human and Kyla Sheffield of WovenMedia devoted half of a year to professionally produce this amazing video that truly brings to life the experience that Common Vision shares with schools and community centers. The Common Vision is humbled in gratitude by their dedication and honored to share this 9-minute preview with each of you. We hope you enjoy “Planting the Vision” and are inspired to care for Mother Earth in your community. Preview DVD
One of the most potent effects of Common Vision’s work on Fruit Tree Tour is the collaborations with local and national organizations with varied foci from urban nutrition to global warming to sustainable farming to arts and ceremony. This collaboration highlight is UrbanFarming.org. Urban Farming’s mission is to eradicate hunger while increasing diversity, motivating youth and seniors, and optimizing the production of food on unused urban land.
Urban Farming founder and Executive Director, Taja Sevelle and Common Vision Education Director Michael Flynn have been in contact for the past 2 years, developing a strategy for working together to make real change towards their shared vision. In 2007, Urban Farming provided a scholarship for a Compton school, Washington Elementary, to participate in the Fruit Tree Tour Program free of charge. As part of the Coalition to Eradicate Hunger, Washington Elementary has agreed to give 10% of their harvest to a local food bank.
While 99% of the students at Washington are on free or reduced lunch, Principal Ontrece Ellerbe agreed that the opportunity for the students to experience giving to their larger community would be indispensable. Urban Farming and Common Vision both view this as the humble beginnings to a long relationship of planting orchards together in Los Angeles.
Here are six projects to improve the health of your trees and continue your students’ relationships with earth stewardship and environmental education!
1. Mulch
Spread Mulch at the base of your new tree- up to 3 feet circumference around the trunk- to keep moisture in and weeds out. Remember to keep the mulch a few inches away from the trunk to avoid rot.
2. Water (of course)
There’s much to learn watching living things grow and even more to learn by helping them along their way. A great lesson on teamwork, responsibility, science and more, keep the students involved in watering the trees. Be careful not to over or underwater 5 gallons a week per tree is a good general recommendation. As the trees grow in their third year and beyond, remember that the “feeder” roots are mostly under the drip line (the outermost tips of the branches) not just under the trunk.
3. Trunk covers
Help keep squirrels, rodents, lawnmowers and weed-wackers away from the young trunk by making cardboard cases around the trunks. Quart-sized milk cartons work well.
4. Cover the graft with paint
Your freshly planted tree may take a while to adapt to its new home and position to the sun. You can help it by taking some stress off of its most sensitive area, around its graft point. To avoid damaging sunburn on the lower trunk and graft, paint a mixture of ½ water, ½ white latex paint on the trunk and graft of your sapling.
5. Remove any weeds from around the base of the tree.
The city of Los Angeles invited Common Vision as the opening act of city's Keep Los Angeles Beautiful Campaign, thanks to Common Vision's work with the mayor's Million Trees LA project. The performance included drumming, dancing, and eco- hip hop. Senator Hillary Clinton, who was among the speakers at the event, expressed her enthusiasm for Common Vision’s tree planting projects.
Common Vision is piloting “Roots to Fruits - School Nurseries to Feed Communities” at 3-4 schools on this year’s Fruit Tree Tour. Common Vision works with the students and teachers to propagate a nursery of 50 – 200 saplings of varieties of fruits that are especially requested and adapted for school plantings in their area. Common Vision educators demonstrate the process of grafting fruit trees (see Grafting 101 below). Students witness and participate in one of the most amazing miracles in nature, the combining of two trees to give both strong roots and delicious fruits. Common Vision gives students the charge to care for the young trees for two years. These trees can then be planted at community centers, neighborhoods in their area and shared with more schools during Fruit Tree Tours to come.
Common Vision’s first “Roots to Fruits” nurseries:
From the indigenous communities of Mexico, Fruit Tree Tour has been honored to travel with a seed carrier, bringing ancient Mayan corn seed to schools to plant with children. The schools agree to take care of the corn and provide a sanctuary for the preservation of the native seed, a refuge, in an act of solidarity with the traditional farming communities that are struggling to maintain their ancient ways. The seeds carry a message of the importance of preserving native seeds and the traditional culture contained within. Students learn from the seed carrier about the genetic modification of corn seeds and the effects of a variety of different modifications, including the threats that these modifications have upon the ancient way of growing our own food from seeds.
The three crops of corn, beans and squash are grown together in Mexico to feed large numbers of people. Students learn about how many products and foods in their daily lives are related to corn. In the desert climate of California where the wind blows strong, three corn seeds are planted together so that their roots will interweave, embracing each other and forming a stable base for the magnificent corn which can grow up to 17 feet tall. Each trio of seeds is spaced one large step away from the next trio of seeds. The corn is planted a depth of 3 inches deep, about the length of an adult's finger pressed into the soil, and then gently covered with soil. The corn likes to be watered once a week, with a good soak, and to dry out again before the next watering 8 days later. The youth are encouraged to care for their corn and thanked for their participation in the global effort to save seed and conserve culture.
