How schools orchards create community

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.  

Week One on Fruit Tree Tour, Spring 2015

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.

Fifteen Years From Now

"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. 

Building a Healthier Community

Many thanks to Nutiva for blogging about our amazing planting together at Richmond College Prep School. It is thanks totally to Nutiva that Common Vision is blessed with the opportunity to plant a new orchard on the campus of every public school in Richmond!

> Read Nutiva's Full Post

Orchard Curriculum launched at four Southern California schools

We figured that if McDonalds could contribute to public school curriculum, well...so can Common Vision. We are very proud to announce that we just launched the first unit in our Orchard Curriculum at four Southern California elementary schools: Carthay, Palms, Round Meadow and Vista del Valle.

Thanks to your support, Common Vision’s week-long unit on decomposers features the California Education and Environment Initiative (EEI) Curriculum as a base and includes hands-on compost and mulching exercises in the orchard. Now, in addition to leaving a wake of fruit forests in food deserts, we are also leaving behind lesson plans straight out of the book of life itself.

For example, orchard learning activities include composting and mulching, when students are introduced to the deep ecological reasons for maintaining soil health. Our juicy curriculum transforms school orchards into living classrooms right in the heart of the city. Now, that is some serious schweetness!!!

California is currently poised to lead the nation in environmental literacy with the Education and Environment Initiative (EEI), a national model designed to help prepare today’s students to become future scientists, economists, and green technology leaders. The K-12th grade curriculum is comprised of 85 units teaching select Science and History-Social Science academic standards. Each EEI Curriculum unit teaches these standards to mastery using a unique set of California Environmental Principles and Concepts. The curriculum was created to bring education about the environment into the primary and secondary classrooms of more than 1,000 school districts serving over 6 million students throughout California.

Thank you so very much for an incredible orchard day at Carthay! We were so very impressed with your team - they worked so hard and so efficiently and with such kindness. It was absolutely amazing - as soon as tree (or vine : ) trimmings dropped to the Earth another team member was there to haul it away - all six dumpsters full!

And I can't believe how quickly the mountain of mulch was moved, and the grapes pruned and everything else expertly pruned and fed - it was a beautiful day and we thank you for it. It is such a HUGE help to have Common Vision come to Carthay each year - our fruit trees anchor our garden. With the care you provide these trees will preserve it for many years and many generations of students to come. Thank you for the amazing work you do.

- Teresa Dahl, Sustainability Schoolyard Ombudsman, Los Angeles Unified School District and Cathay Elementary Garden Coordinator

A daytrip down to Orange County

We had so many LA area schools on the schedule this tour that we only had time for a daytrip down to Orange County for a fantastic planting at Brea Junior High School. With so much suburban sprawl, it’s amazing to remember that OC's namesake were the orchards that once carpeted the county. It’s great to see students start to reclaim some of that heritage by planting a new school orchard. Eighteen new fruit trees went in the ground today, and urban agriculture continued its beautiful expansion into Southern California suburbs.

As fulfilling as it is for Fruit Tree Tour to return to thriving orchards that we planted back before co-director Leo Buc was 21, we have to admit that there’s a uniquely special feeling in the air when we are putting a new school orchard in the ground for the first time. Watching a schoolyard transform from a lawn into an orchard in just a day is itself transformative to witness. A superindent from the local school district came by Brea Junior High to see what all the buzz was about. After watching our amazing all-volunteer army of modern-day Johnny Appleseeds in action, he turned and told us, “I love it!”

Massive gratitude to EnrichLA for keeping Markham’s orchard juicy

It’s not every day that the flagship of our biofueled fleet gets a chance to play the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but our visit to Markham Middle School was one such auspicious occasion. On this visit, we returned to prune and feed the trees, improve the irrigation system, and create colorful orchard signs with the students. It was great to see an entire 6th grade science class outside using the orchard as a living laboratory!

First planted on Fruit Tree Tour 2007, this 30-tree orchard is producing tons of free, fresh juicy fruit. We want to express gratitude to EnrichLA for being the group on the ground who makes sure that Markham’s orchard gets enough to drink during the hot Southern California summers. 

EnrichLA is an environmental non-profit focused on adding edible school gardens to public schools. Their gardens are inexpensive, promote community involvement, encourage respect for the planet, act as outdoor classrooms, cheer up school campuses, help students build a good work ethic, and promote thoughtful and healthy eating habits. Needless to say, we are perfectly aligned!

Student innovation and drip irrigation at Crenshaw High in LA

The orchard Crenshaw High is more like a food forest than most school orchards. Rather than rows of trees in an otherwise manicured schoolyard, this more natural-looking ecosystem features multiple levels of canopy, permaculture style. In that spirit, some students, aware that water is too precious to waste, transformed a leaky water pipe into flood irrigation for their orchard by digging a drainage from the leak to the trees.

Originally planted by Community Services Unlimited (CSU)  in 2003, there are now about 55 mature fruit trees at Crenshaw High including mango, sapote, Chilean wine palm, loquats, figs and all sorts of tasty tropical and subtropical fruits. We’ve been hearing about this orchard for years and really wanting to make it a stop on Fruit Tree Tour.

Many thanks to Crenshaw for inviting us to stop by and unload a bus-load of Common Vision-strength lovin’. It was a fast and furious half-day stop where we were able to put their entire food forest on drip irrigation thanks to engaged, helpful students.

1st grade teacher turns orchard caretaker at Will Rogers Elementary

Will Rogers Elementary was the first school where we introduced mulch mania and installed drip irrigation. The payoff has been a bumper crop of peaches, figs and persimmons. Big juicy props go out to first grade teacher Kris Guzman for volunteering to be the school’s primary orchard caretaker. Thanks to some seriously skillful pruning by Kris, these trees have the strong structure they need to produce tons and tons of fruit for years and years to come. This year marked our third visit here!

When we first visted Will Rogers Elementary in 2011, they had just seven fruit trees. We made it full-scale school orchard by planting 18 more.   They now have a producing cheriymoya, one of Common Vision’s official favorite varieties. Cherimoya trees love Southern California’s coastal climate from San Diego to Santa Barbara, prime planting territory for Fruit Tree Tour. According to Michael Flynn, it is "a super delicious fruit with sweet undertones of bubble gum.” Besides citrus, it is one of the only fruits in season during Spring tour, another reason we love it!

Innovative AG programs promote community participation in school orchards

You’ve seen the orchard at Stephen White Middle School featured in our recent 5-minute video report on Fruit Tree Tour. This orchard is also special because it’s part of an innovative hybrid model where students and community members cooperatively care for it.

The school’s innovative AG program provides city-dwellers a place to grow food and provides the school with the volunteer base that it needs to keep its garden and orchard thriving. Part of the deal is that the school gets an allotment of garden plots and fresh produce to educate and nourish students. It’s a match made in heaven!

Shortly after we planted the orchard in 2011, it fell fallow due to adminstrative turnover, and their cherimoya tree didn’t survive the transition. Enter Javier, the owner of a local garden and landscape company. Javier stepped up early on to help care for Stephen White Middle School’s orchard, and when the cherimoya that we originally planted gave up the sap, Javier replaced is right away. That’s the kind of community support we are seeing at more and more of our maturing orchards across California.

The happy ending, or rather new beginning, to this report is that Stephen White Middle School is reinvigorating its once-thriving AG program. When it first opened in the 1950s, the campus included over an acre of land set aside for an urban farm. Hard to believe, huh? Its sister campus, Peary Middle School–also the home of a Common Vision orchard–shares a virtually identical campus design. It’s super inspiring to see both schools get back to their agricultural roots in the heart of LA’s urban sprawl.

Another orchard hero is Henry Washington from Peary Middle School. He’s not only got a green thumb but he is an awesome role model in and out of the orchard.  It is beautiful to watch the kids return his kindness in spades with massive mutual respect. It’s our third year working side-by-side with this local legend, and their apples are some of the sweetest we’ve ever tasted.

In the words of Leo Buc, these communities are "doing a super fantastic job showing how school orchards can bring, and keep, people together, even, and especially, during a transition in leadership.”

You’d think school orchards could save the world or something. We do!

Good Food Movement takes root in South LA

The Good Food Movement is putting down deep roots and bearing real fruit in South LA. How deep? Deep enough now that CSU treated the Common Vision crew to a nutritious, delicious dinner at their very own “beyond organic” seasonal cafe at The Village Marketplace in Mercado La Poloma, a mall-style neighborhood food court run by a local non-profit organization.  It is inspiring to see a community rise up and work together to create local food security and good green jobs.
 
The Village Marketplace sells what they grow, supports local farmers, teaches natural farming, and makes good food available at affordable prices in accessible places through South LA. So, if you’ve ever wondered where the fruit from our orchards can end up, it’s at amazing new social enterprises like this that are starting to sprout across the state.

Healthy Food Map features Common Vision orchards in South LA

> Download the Health Food Map

It was a perfect storm of sustainability on the day that the Common Vision caravan visited Normandie Avenue Elementary. That same day, our perennial partner, Community Services Unlimited (CSU), launched their new Healthy Food Map heralding the end of South LA’s status as a food desert.
 

To get the word out about the launch of CSU'S Healthy Food Map, 50 local cyclists pedaled their way to stops on the map, including our thriving 50-tree orchard at Normandie Avenue Elementary. The combo of 50 energized cyclists, 50 thriving fruit trees and a busload of Common Visionaires was 100% EPIC, and a sign of good things to come!
 
The Healthy Food Map shows residents of South LA where local, fresh, organic food is now available nearby–everywhere from urban farm stands to school orchards like the one Common Vision and CSU planted at Normandie Avenue Elementary way back in 2005.
 
It was also amazing to work side-by-side again with master gardener Ned Boyer who has been helping take care of the Normandie Avenue Elementary orchard since it was first planted back in 2005. The school created a living classroom by installing a perfect circle of permanent benches in their thriving school orchard.  When asked how the trees are doing, Leo Buc exclaimed, “Their apples are cranking!”

Optimum Bubble Speed discovered in LA

Common Vision is almost as well known for our all-organic, solar-powered, bio-fueled fleet as we are for our school orchards. As we’ve toured the state over the past ten years we’ve been called “a bus full of hope” and “a bliss bubble leaving orchards in its wake.” This year, we’re now known in LA for actual bubbles blowing behind the bus.

On Saturday, January 23, when we pulled onto the parking lot also known to Los Angelenos as Interstate 5, well, we got a bit bored. And what better way to pass the time with a busload of tree-planting do-gooders than to have a bubble-blowing contest. How is this at all relevant you ask? Well, we learned two interesting lessons.

First, optimal bubble speed (OBS) is between 8 and 13 miles per hour, depending on humidity, where the bubble wand needs only to be held out the window to rain bubbles on the freeway. Second, we were reminded how amazingly hyperconnected humanity is, even when just sitting in traffic. Someone else inching along with us on Interstate 5 saw our web address on the bus, and sent a real-time message thanking us for the bubbles and the smiles!

Vista del Valle teams up with Sustainable Clairmont to teach Orchard Curriculum

Can you believe that some of the first students that we worked with at Vista del Valle Elementary are now in college? The orchard that they planted is thriving, especially if you love apples and apricots! Over the past eight years, their school orchard come to define campus culture; and the staff is completely committed to having Common Vision come back to help care for their fruit trees and roll out our Orchard Curriculum.

Working with Sustainable Clairemont, Vista del Valle Elementary wants to set a statewide example of how effective an Orchard Curriculum can be in helping young minds deeply understand the earth sciences, social studies and language arts that they study in the classroom. Their local goal is to create collaborative models within their community to increase eco-literacy at every school in Clairemont. What a beautiful ripple effect!

Sustainable Claremont was formed to provide educational resources, to engage in advocacy, and to take actions that move their entire city towards sustainability, not only within Claremont but beyond its borders. They are a non-profit organization independent of the City who work in close cooperation with it and with other organizations such as Common Vision.

It is immeasurably rewarding to be welcomed back year after year to Vista de Valle, one of our most successful school orchards by far! We really loved this visit when a Vista del Valle volunteer came up and told us that her kids, now in college, had attended school there and still talk about the day that the Common Vision caravan first pulled onto campus.

How many elementary school programs did you still talk about at college? Your support made this magic possible. Thank you!!!

It just keeps getting better!

It just keeps getting better! Just when we think that Fruit Tree Tour can’t possibly blow us away again, it does! From our amazing new crew to generous corporate sponsors to maturing collaborations with community organizations like Planting Justice and Spring Street Farm, Common Vision is collectively pinching ourselves at how much good news we have to share.

When we first started planting school orchards we were pretty much in the bare-root business. We planted new school orchards as fast as our bio-powered fleet could get us to the next stop, and put on one BIG show in the process...big enough that Common Visionary Zak Human and the Woven Media crew won an Emmy Award for their PBS special about Fruit Tree Tour titled Plant the Vision.

Now, as we return to orchards planted on past tours, we are beyond blown away to see the profound positive change the presence a thriving schoolyard orchard is having on students, teachers, administrators and the surrounding community. There’s way more to share than we can pack into one email, but below are a few wordy highlights from the past week that we hope give you just a teeny tiny sense of what a massive blessing and privilege it is to be a part of Fruit Tree Tour.

So, thank you all again and again for your support. Scroll down, relax, and enjoy catching up on some really good stuff happening out there in the world, that YOU are helping make happen!

RootDown LA to the Rescue

Following a recent round of budget cuts, the garden program at Jefferson High in LA abruptly ended, and its 35-tree school orchard was in need of urgent care. That’s when RootDown LA came to the rescue with ongoing care of the orchard. But first, we had to whoop out a busload of Common Vision-grade loving to bring this fledgling food forest back to life.

When looking at the photos immediately above, you may be asking yourself, “why is that guy watering cardboard boxes? Shouldn't he be watering fruit trees? What kind of tour is this anyway?” Well, the answer is, the triage plan for this orchard included a mulching of mythic proportions to rebuild soil, kick start micro life, and reinvigorate the orchard ASAP.

But wait, there’s more. It gets even better.

A junior at Jefferson High shared how “super stoked” she was that Common Vision came back. She also shared how hard she was working with fellow students to get their test scores high enough to get their funding back. Thankfully, the School Orchard Movement is starting to thrive throughout the state, and with a little collaboration between RootDown LA and Common Vision, this orchard’s future will be a whole lot juicier now.



We have to end this post by sharing a sweet story of synchronicity. Sadly, when garden programs get cut, kids miss out on learning many of the big basics of life on earth like the fact that fruit forms from a flower. We love seeing the awe on kids’ faces learning about this natural connection for the first time. Our visit to Jefferson High included one wonderful moment when a single bee landed in front of us, playing its part in the never-ending cycle of life, demonstrating pollination at the exact moment we were explaining it. Things that make you go, Hmmmm.

EPIC Urban Farm and Orchard in Long Beach

We are honored and humbled at the opportunity to collaborate with the Long Beach Community Action Project at their cosmic-class Spring Street Farm, an urban, organic teaching farm and farm stand. The farm "mitigates blight and boasts row farming; demonstration plots; a farm stand for produce sales; a chicken yard; and a rain garden.” 

Located in a neighborhood next to an oil field, this place is pumping out fresh fruit and veggies like it’s everybody’s business. And it is. Spring Street Farm Stand serves the local community by providing a place to procure fresh, local, organic produce. Better still, they accept food stamps and hire local youth. BOOM! 

Ready to really rock your reality? Spring Street Farm, a tiny 1.5 acre agricultural oasis in the middle of industrial Long Beach, also has its own families of ducks, geese and chicken that help keep the scourge of suburbia from encroaching on the farm, lawn grass.

It gets better. Long Beach Community Action Partnership distributes an astonishing amount of food grown at the farm to the community through awesome neighborhood networks. If you ever find yourself in Long Beach, stop by and prepare to be inspired. And how is the 40-tree orchard Common Vision planted at Spring Street Farm on Fruit Tree Tour in 2011? According to Michael Flynn it’s “super thriving!”

We recommend checking out their blog, The Farm Desk, or following Spring Street Farm Project on Facebook.

All signs predict a fruity future at Palms Elementary

If the signs are any indication, it’s going to be a fruity future at Palms Elementary in Los Angeles. On our stop there this season, we planted nine new fruit trees and mulched the heck out of the orchard. Thank you to all of our donors who sponsored the art supplies that the kids used to make signs showing what’s what in their new school orchard.

Here’s what Clémence Gossett, the garden program director Palms Elementary had to say when she wrote to us after our visit:

"Thank you so very, very much for bringing your kindness, energy and expertise to Palms this Monday.  Our garden is vibrant and nourished thanks to your help.  Your volunteers were beyond wonderful. Their enthusiasm and patience with the students was appreciated by our friends, teachers and students. This was truly an experience that will keep on giving!  Please forward this email to your volunteers.  You can follow our gardens’ progress on Facebook."

Big Props to Carthay Elementary Parents!

In addition to all of the free, fresh fruit a school orchard provides, one of the best added benefits is parent participation. At Carthay Center Elementary in Los Angeles, parents showed up in force for a workday with Common Vision to care for their 25-tree orchard and plant four more. This is what it’s all about!

No Orchard Left Behind

Here’s an interesting tidbit for all you contemporary anthropologists following the emergence of post-modern School Orchard Movement in California. Common Vision’s collaboration with Planting Justice is proof positive that orchards can outlive institutions, and keep communities together in the process.

Case in point is a school orchard planted back in 2008 at Explore College Preparatory Middle School in Oakland. Sadly, the school has since closed due to funding cuts. In the case of this school closing, there was an orchard left behind, and a community that came together to care for it. Feeling good yet?

This 20-tree fruity oasis is not your average urban orchard either. It is situated on a steep slope perfect for a swale to soak up rainwater. We really love putting our permaculture skills to work whenever the landscape allows. On this visit, we installed a new drip irrigation system to help the community easily keep up on watering, especially during the East Bay’s warmer (ahem) months.

And it gets even better. Since the school closed, our friends at Planting Justice stepped in and set up a program to host work parties and alert neighbors when fruit is ripe and ready for the picking. Planting Justice is a non-profit organization based in Oakland, CA dedicated to food justice, economic justice, and sustainable local food systems.

They are the first organization of their kind to combine ecological training and urban food production with a grassroots door-to-door organizing model.  They make sure that urban orchards grow deep roots in their local community.

So, when you donate to Common Vision, or any group in the School Orchard Movement, you really are leaving behind a living legacy that creates community, and that’s gotta feel good!