Our community is a lower-middle-class area where people typically have enough to get by, but are often living paycheck to paycheck. In the last year inflation and economic factors caused our free and reduced lunch population to increase to nearly 50%. Early in the year, our group investigated the biggest needs in our community and our research pointed us in a clear direction, food security.
We would like to add a community orchard to our existing community garden. With funding our group hopes to add an orchard of 10-15 trees at our community garden. All year we have tried to tackle food security, we've shared our community garden harvest, we've cooked community meals, and we've raised money to stock our community food pantry. We've even expanded our projects to include other school districts in the efforts that everyone has safe access to food. After harvesting this fall, we were asked by a local resident to help pick his apple and pear trees. This experience made us realize that fruit trees can be an incredible source of fresh fruit for a community. This led us to brainstorm ways to supplement our community garden with a small orchard.
We have had a community garden for 4 years now. Our goal this year was to be able to add fruit trees to the garden for sustained growth and long-term impact. Using grant money from Roots and Shoots plus a local grant we were able to purchase and plant 31 Apple Trees for our garden, creating an orchard area. Our trees are 3-year old trees and should be producing fruit in approximately 3 years. These tress will also provide a wonderful source of pollen and nectar for our honey bees that are also onsite. When we purchased the trees we put out a call for help from our community. We were able to have 30+ individuals from all age groups come out and help us! While our immediate impact is small, long term this project is going to have a tremendous impact on our community and will provide all sorts of learning opportunities for our students.
Sometimes all you have to do is dream big and ask for help!
I'm not sure how much we would change about this project, it went well.
Seeing how many people came out to help.
Make sure to have a large area, communicate well, and ask for help!
