By Diana Raiselis
One of my favorite things about Fruit Tree Tour is seeing how teachers and school leaders use their orchards as a tool for hands-on teaching, and for building community. After our visit to Birney Elementary in the San Diego area, I'm still thinking about how wonderfully Ms. Mindy has done this at her school. From the moment our bus rolled onto campus, I could see the vitality that the school garden & orchard brought to the campus: the rainbow-colorblocked storage containers that formed her outdoor classroom, brightly painted signs dotted planting beds, and the space itself was alive with students, working on the mulch pile and running between fruiting trees.
By Trevien Stanger
I write to you this evening from the breezy confines of the Common Vision tour bus. Dusk is falling here at our camp-ground on the outskirts of San Diego, with the high crags of the Laguna mountains to the east turning a desert crimson in the sunset. Below the window, just outside, I hear the chattering din of my fellow Tour crew members– they sit beside a forking campfire, headlamps trained upon small white boards in their dirt-caked hands as they sand down the edges, readying them for an orchard-sign painting workshop tomorrow morning. Beyond them, working beneath some towering eucalyptus trees, are two other crew members watering over thirty citrus trees and a half-dozen bags of bare-root fruit trees– peaches, persimmons, figs, apples, plums, and nectarines. Just another evening of Fruit Tree Tour, and as I bite into a piece of citrus as the orange sun finally sets, I begin to set down some recollections for you of my first week on Tour.
But before I go much further, perhaps I ought to catch you up some on what this whole “Fruit Tree Tour” thing is in the first place. The Tour is one of the primary activities of an educational non-profit organization called Common Vision. Operating in California, CV is built upon a desire to address a suite of multi-pronged and interconnected problems– poor nutrition in inner-city schools; urban food-deserts (places where community members do not have access to food beyond that which is available in gas stations and convenience stores); and the lack of quality environmental programming in these underserved areas. Common Vision believes that one way we might to address these issues is to both simple and profound: plant fruit tree orchards at public schools the length of California, and in the process, to use the opportunity to provide students with unique, immersive, environmentally-educational experiences in the process.
"This tree you're planting today is a gift to the future," I tell my group. Looking around at their faces I see the usual scene: a couple eyes locked on me, some checking for worms in the dirt, and naturally, one pair has drifted off to distant day dreams. I wonder if they get the message; maybe I should repeat that part? But then I remember yesterday.
