June
Fruit Trees
There’s a movement afoot. People are bringing food back into their yards and neighborhoods, they’re planting food forests, and cultivating local larders. In cities like Seattle and London people are working to plant fruit trees, rally harvest days, and cull fruit from metropolitan trees. They are raising awareness about food security, public health, urban sustainability, and ecosystem services. Organizations like Urban Food Forestry and Falling Fruit are encouraging people to take advantage of this cost-effective way of reconnecting with food and nature by providing resources and interactive maps to trees around the world – maybe even your neighborhood – where people are invited to harvest fruits and nuts.
Ecosystem services is a newly emerged concept that celebrates the positive benefits that wildlife or ecosystems provide to people. Four major categories of ecosystem services have been identified by the United Nation’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. They include:
- Provisioning – providing food, water, timber, fuel, and medicines;
- Regulating – filtering air and water, pollinating, and controlling erosion;
- Supporting – providing essential life-supporting functions like photosynthesis and nutrient cycling; and
- Cultural Services – offering opportunities for recreation, and creativity born from interactions with nature.
Just as fruit trees provide an ecosystem service to people, bees and other pollinators provide a service for the trees. Many fruit trees are not self pollinating. This means pollen from the flower’s anther (the male reproductive part) must be delivered to the stigma (the female reproductive part) of a flower on another tree.
Some plants can self pollinate in order to create a viable seed (like lettuces, tomatoes, beans, and peas) but this is not the case with many fruit trees, including apples, pears, and most sweet cherries. This is why many of the urban food forest movements include an effort to maintain bee populations – and why there is such a big concern about entire bee colonies dying.
Find out more about why scientist think Colony Collapse Disorder is happening (or watch the Nature Net-recommended documentary “Queen of the Sun“) and learn what you can do to help pollinator populations. You might even consider raising your own backyard bees. After all, bees are responsible for pollinating over 100 crop plants.
Did you know…
If you plant a seed from your granny smith apple, a different apple variety will grow on your new tree. The apple’s reproductive strategy is called “extreme heterozygote.” This means that during seed production, the genetic material from the parent trees combines in a completely random fashion and thus, a random fruit is produced. This explains why orchards use grafting to grow specific desired fruits.
To Do This Month:
Be sure to check out the ever-expanding fruit garden at Nature Net member site, Community GroundWorks at Troy Gardens. And keep an eye out for classes on fruit tree pruning and other orchard education.
Stop by Olbrich Garden’s Blooming Butterflies event now through August 9th to learn more about these important pollinators.
Our Favorite Fruit Tree Books
June Events
Community GroundWorks at Troy Gardens
Up-Cycled Tree
For Educators:
School Yard Orchards
Whether teaching about interdependent relationships in ecosystems, the structure and function of plant parts, or matter and energy in organisms (examples from K, 1 and 5 Next Generation Science Standards, respectively), or simply encouraging a better understanding of food systems and where our food comes from, fruit trees on the school grounds can provide easy, hands-on learning opportunities.
Luckily for those in Wisconsin the Wisconsin School Garden Initiative from Nature Net partner Community GroundWorks, is working to support new and existing gardens at schools, after school sites, and childcare centers. They provide resources, curricula, and training in an effort to bolster youth gardens and aide garden educators.
Through the use of school gardens and orchards, this program – and others across the nation – hope to improve child health and enliven academic instruction.
If you’re ready to dig in and get started on your own school-ground orchard, you can start with grant funding from The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation, and get inspiration and resources from the Edible Schoolyard Project or the Farm to School Network. Nature Net also recommends the Got Dirt? curriculum from WI Dept. of Health Services’ Nutrition and Physical Activity program.
Once you’re up and running, – and even if you don’t have fruit trees – you can take part in the Great Lakes Apple Crunch on October 22nd, 2015 and join students from the Great Lakes Region in collectively crunching into locally grown apples.
For Families:
Tricks of the Trail – Planting Trees
Starting a family orchard or adding fruit bearing plantings to your home landscape is easier to implement than one might think. Begin by checking the plant hardiness zone in your area to better understand your local climate and then tap into the knowledge of your local extension office to learn which cultivars (or plant varieties that once were naturally occurring species and are now maintained via cultivation) are most likely to survive in your zone.
Some of the home fruit cultivars recommended for southern Wisconsin include not just apples trees but also pears, crabapples, cherries, plums, and apricots. These tips from Arbor Day Foundation, including pre-soaking bare roots, leaving a three-foot diameter clearing around the tree, and watering every 7-10 days, will help set up your new tree for success.
And careful pruning, fertilizing, and staking (as recommended by the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation) will help ensure your tree stays healthy and your harvest is bountiful. Keep pests and disease at bay with information from Wisconsin Horticulture.
TreeHugger.com provides some fun inspiration for backyard fruit trees, as does InHabitat.com.
If you don’t have the space (or the time to wait for maturity), you can also try strawberries, raspberries, currants, grapes, juneberries, elderberries or gooseberries like those pictured above. Gooseberry pie, anyone?