Pre-tour Mania | Fruit Tree TV 2011 | Episode #1

The 2011 Crew says Hi!

Fruit Trees by Air

Come, fly the route that the world's largest veggie-oil powered caravan will travel for this the 8th annual Fruit Tree Tour. Starting in 15 days, 20 volunteers will begin an adventure to inspire another 10,000 students and plant another 600 fruit trees.

Grisman plays for Common Vision

On November 5th of 2010, Common Vision was blessed to have the David Grisman Quintet play for a Fruit Tree Tour benefit.

Slicing the Ground for Another 500-Tree Orchard

Just before the fall rains, the M.A. Center began implementing a second 500-tree orchard that they have been designing with Common Vision, Dr. Elaine Ingham, and Darren Doherty. The design calls for a 2 year soil building program before the trees are planted. After smoothing out the access to the new Lotus Pond Orchard, the area has been sliced on a keyline pattern to infiltrate every last drop of water that falls on the 3 acres. The area was seeded with clover and a soil building mix to fix nitrogen and add biomass to the soil.

Engaging Underground Allies

In the past 3 years Common Vision has worked with GreenFriends to develop a permaculture design the 380-acre property of the MA Center in Castro Valley.

Under the guidance of Dr. Elaine Ingham, expert in soil microlife, we have been working to create a rich soil that functions biologically like a forest soil. Forests have the most complex populations of microorganism dominated by fungi as opposed to grassy hillsides which are have much simpler populations that are primarily bacterial.

By adding over 450 cubic yards of decomposing wood chips, inoculated with a great diversity of microorganisms and fed with fungal foods (like fish and seaweed), we are quickly building a forest-like soil. The result of this bottom-up approach is much healthier trees, deeper penetrating root systems, lower watering needs, and little to no fertilizing needs.

We will keep you abreast of further developments.

Mapping 180 School Orchards

As part of Fruit Tree Tour 2011, Common Vision is expanding our tree care support for school orchards. To get a good picture of the 180 planting sites from 7 years of the tour, we plugged the schools into a Google Map. Here we get a birds eye view of a 4,200-tree orchard spread through the state. It's an interactive map so click around.


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