How Urban Orchards Improve a Community’s Access to Fresh, Healthy Food
School gardens have enjoyed at least two distinct heydays in the United States. The first, in the years after World War I, saw some 75,000 school gardens pop up as a means to incorporate outdoor time and food-plant education into a child’s day. We’re still in the midst of the second, which surged in the mid-1990s when California launched an initiative called A Garden in Every School and chef Alice Waters kicked off her Edible Schoolyard Project. There are now almost 7,000 school gardens stretching across the U.S. by last formal count — this time around, also recognized as a valuable tool for increasing kids’ access to healthy foods.
Largely left out of the school-food equation, though, have been tree fruits and nuts — an oversight that Maine-based ReTreeUS is working to overcome. Since its founding in 2009, the nonprofit has planted more than 100 orchards, ranging in size from 10 to 100 trees, in schoolyards in its home state as well as in Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Orchards give children “easy access to the natural environment,” says founder Richard Hodges, granting them the ability to “watch trees grow over time, care for them and [see] those trees begin to fruit.” ReTreeUS is part of a much larger movement that aims not only to plant orchards in schools, but to place them widely across urban spaces — in vacant lots, community gardens, parks, and hospital and faith-based plots. They’re a potent way, says Ryan Watson, to “make community impact.”
Watson is national orchard operations and education manager for The Giving Grove, an organization begun in Kansas City, Missouri, in 2013 that’s partnered with programs like ReTreeUS to establish, to date, 680 orchards in 16 cities from Seattle, Washington, to Raleigh, North Carolina. These orchards provide nutritious food, as well as co-benefits like shade-giving tree canopy, to residents of under-resourced neighborhoods. As the federal government begins to cut back on programs that help low-income Americans afford groceries, and strips funding for school meals that provide fresh local food, “That makes the work that we do even more imperative for supporting people who otherwise might not have access,” Watson says.