North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[mIEKAL aND <qazingulaza@gmail.com>]

(this will be interesting to follow, hopefully they'll pay a lot of
attention to disease resistant varieties..)


Advocates envision free fruit and nuts for Madison parks

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/article_3a129588-1014-54ef-8950-caec44b996ca.html

By PAT SCHNEIDER | The Capital Times | pschneider@madison.com |
Posted: Monday, February 8, 2010 5:40 am

Talk with advocates of the newest tree-loving initiative in the city,
and the mind conjures visions of Madison as a latter-day Eden dotted
with trees heavy with fruit, ripe for the picking.

As impossibly idyllic as that may sound, it’s pretty much what the
members of Madison Fruit and Nuts have in mind: fruit-bearing (and
nut-bearing) trees in a public place near you, where you can watch the
fruit form and ripen and when the time is just right, reach up and
pluck it.

“We want free, organic, locally grown fruit to be there and available
to anyone,” says Janet Parker. A member of the Madison Park Board of
Commissioners, Parker is also a driving force in Madison Fruit and
Nuts, an informal grassroots group whose zealous drive to spread fruit
through the city is finding fertile ground. After an organizational
meeting in December that attracted nearly 100 people and later, a warm
reception from the Park Board, organizers started working with Parks
Division staff to identify parks that might be appropriate for small
orchard plantings.

The group is hoping to be selected by the Fruit Tree Planting
Foundation, a California-based organization that has brought orchards
to places as diverse as Hurricane Katrina-ravaged New Orleans,
American Indian tribal lands in Arizona and Midvale Elementary School
in Madison. Eschewing apples because of the trees’ susceptibility to a
variety of pests, Madison Fruit and Nut organizers would focus
initially, if selected, on pears, plums and peaches. Normally
associated with warmer climates, Parker insists that even peaches can
be grown in Dane County, especially in urban Madison, where trapped
heat creates a warmer microclimate. Suitable nut trees might include a
hardy pecan, hazelnut, hickory and new blight-resistant varieties of
the American chestnut.

Because of the high level of enthusiasm for public fruit orchards,
Madison Parks Division staff have been working on two tracks over the
past several weeks: fast-tracking identification of parks where an
orchard might be planted as early as this year; and developing
guidelines for assessing any future proposals, says Parker. So far,
parks getting a preliminary nod for application to the foundation by
its Feb. 28 deadline are Reindahl Park on the east side and
Marlborough Park in the Allied Drive neighborhood, on the border with
Fitchburg. The foundation — which travels to the winning sites,
purchases local trees and plants them with community volunteers —
takes on projects where at least a dozen dwarf trees can be
accommodated.

A primary concern of the Parks Division is whether a fruit orchard
would conflict with the existing plan for any park, like placement of
sports fields or play equipment, says spokeswoman Laura Whitmore.
Equally important: “Who’s going to take care of this?” she says.
Developing guidelines for acceptable plans to plant, maintain and
harvest fruit trees is crucial because no parks workers are available
for additional duties, and fruit trees are more work than other trees,
Whitmore says. The Park Board’s Habitat Stewardship Committee is
scheduled to review proposed guidelines on Tuesday, with adoption by
the commission in March at the earliest. “Then for any subsequent
proposals for edible landscapes, we will have guidelines on which to
base a decision,” she says. Parker says that with guidelines in place,
fruit tree enthusiasts can use volunteer labor and funds to develop
orchards in the future — with or without assistance from any
particular source.

The importance of volunteer labor became important quickly at the
Fruit Tree Planting Foundation orchard created in 2007 at Midvale
Elementary School, 502 Caromar Drive. Keeping the new trees watered
during a dry spell shortly after their planting was a challenge for
the volunteer stewards of the orchard, says parent and volunteer
Rachel Martin. The west side orchard, part of a community garden on
school property, has 34 fruiting trees and 24 fruit shrubs — a real
chore to keep moist during a drought. The solution? Number the plants
and assign them to the scores of student gardeners to water. Many
hands made a daunting job doable, Martin says.

The orchard is popular with both its student and gardening
communities. “Everyone is just delighted that they can walk up and
just take the fruit. It’s really cool,” Martin enthuses. Such casual
harvesting is adequate now, because the young trees produce only a
fraction of the bounty they will bear when mature in a few more years.
School officials are working with community members in the meantime to
tailor the orchard experience to the young students at Midvale, who
are in kindergarten through second grade. “I’m hoping children will
understand where fruit comes from, and learn science in a meaningful
way by watching plants flower and the flower turn to fruit,” Martin
says.

The Midvale orchard is one of three sizeable public orchards already
growing in Madison, says Parker. The others are a stand of about 20
mature apple trees on the grounds of Mendota Mental Health Institute
now tended by volunteers from nearby Troy Gardens and the 10-tree
Jessica Bullen Orchard and Quiet Garden in the south side’s Quann
Park, completed in 2008.

There’s no guarantee that Madison Fruit and Nuts will win a grant from
the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation, but its director had good things
to say about the city when contacted by phone. The foundation is
accepting the first 100 applications for public lands orchards it
receives by Feb. 28 and will select among those which projects it will
take on. “We’d love to bring the program to Madison. We were so
impressed by the mind-set and enthusiasm for green projects” when
visiting the city for the Midvale project, says director Cem Akin. The
fact that Midvale’s orchard is thriving is another indication that the
Madison community is ripe for public fruit orchards, he says.

The foundation, a small nonprofit organization founded in 2002 by raw
food guru David Wolfe, is dedicated to dispersing fruiting plants to
the world to benefit the environment and provide nutritious food. It
has planted more than 60 orchards in locations around the world,
including Kenya, Brazil and India as well as Chicago; Columbus, Ohio;
and Sioux City, S.D. “We believe the benefits of fruit trees to be
pretty much universal. We’d definitely love to do more plantings in
the Midwest,” Akin says.

To make a new orchard succeed, getting enough volunteers lined up at
the start is important, says Jim Winkle, a Madison Fruit and Nuts
member with experience in community gardening. He recalls going door
to door to get volunteers for one project. “You really want a lot of
people on board at the beginning when the buy-in is easier,” says
Winkle, also one of the organizers behind the memorial Bullen Orchard
that was developed as a community project with the help of a
neighborhood grant from the city. “That’s the model the city’s looking
at.”

He’s gratified by the depth of interest in the Fruit and Nuts
initiative. “It’s really phenomenal, but there’s a lot of interest in
urban food, period,” says Winkle. This project has whetted his
appetite for gleaning — collecting and eating naturally growing food
from the landscape — and he’d like to see Madison fruit sources
identified and mapped. A national website, Neighborhood Fruit, already
provides that service — complete with a mobile iPhone application, he
notes, though Madison is not yet a part of it. “It would be a win-win;
people could access food, and fruit on trees in parks would be
harvested, so there would be no worry about having to clean it up,”
Winkle says.

Harvesting is popular at Troy Gardens, where there are about 30 fruit
trees, some of them along busy Troy Drive. People walk dogs along the
street, wait for buses, and they also watch and wait for the fruit to
ripen, says Christie Ralston, interim executive director of Community
GroundWorks, the nonprofit group that runs the community gardens.
“People who are out there a lot really look for it.”

Enjoying fruit straight from the trees can take some changes in
attitude, Ralston says, like getting over the idea that it’s not OK to
graze from a plant you don’t own or that doing so is somehow “not
sanitary,” as a teen in a Troy Gardens program protested about
mulberries from the bushes there. But once they get used to the idea,
Ralston says, people are likely to return with a purple-stained mouth
from an in-season visit to the garden. “Once people start eating, they
always like it,” she says.

Maybe that’s the secret behind the enthusiasm for Madison Fruit and
Nuts: a universal appetite for the fresh and sweet. Or maybe it’s
something more uniquely Madison, as Winkle suggests in quoting the
group’s slogan: “Madison Fruit and Nuts: because Madison needs more of
both.”

“Who wouldn’t want to join a group like that?” he asks.