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The EarthWorks Urban Orchards Program works with local groups and residents to improve the quality of urban life by planting and maintaining fruit and nut trees, shrubs, and vines. The program concentrates on neighborhoods with limited resources, where community efforts are easily visible and a significant and needed improvement in the landscape can happen quickly. EarthWorks staff works with local communities to design, plant, and care for the urban orchards. The program connects people with the nature in their neighborhood. While working together in the orchards in service to the community, people learn about sustainable natural food growing, plant life cycles and ecosystems. The harvest is available for everyone to eat.

Our program has oftentimes provided trees, tools, mulch, fertilizer, and horticultural and organizing expertise. We work with the local community to plan and plant the site. We monitor new orchards for at least three years, continuing to provide care and training where needed. We sometimes coordinate community maintenance of orchards. In rare cases, we establish an ongoing commitment to maintaining an orchard.

In deciding where to plant orchards, we channel our planting efforts on land that is publicly accessible so that the fruit is available to the general community. Thus, our orchard sites include schoolyards, community gardens, public housing developments and cooperatives, youth centers, parks, churchyards, abandoned city-owned lots, and publicly-owned urban wilds. Our orchards vary in size from a couple trees to more than 100.

While the criterion of public accessibility has been important in focusing our limited resources, the concept of urban orchards is broader than this criterion; and others may place less or no emphasis on it. The notion of urban orchards extends to individual urban homeowners who plant on their house lots.

Based on our fourteen plus years of experience with urban orchards, we have developed the following four criteria for planting new orchards.

1. Before planting a new orchard there must be a credible plan to fund and plant the orchard, provide ongoing care, and utilize the fruit. EarthWorks may work with groups to seek funding and establish plans for long term care.
2. EarthWorks usually only plants orchards on land owned by non-profit organizations and government agencies, such as churches, schools, community centers, low-income housing, parks, and public green space. In rare cases, as a way of furthering its goals of making local fruit available to the public and providing environmental learning sites, EarthWorks may plant an orchard on publicly accessible private land.
3. In establishing new orchards, EarthWorks gives precedence to sites whose fruit will be available to the public or persons of low income.
4. EarthWorks will not plant an orchard where there is a reasonable possibility that the trees will be removed within fifteen years.

Urban orchards provide many potential benefits

Contact with nature
Urban residents are usually removed from nature and the agricultural lifestyle of their ancestors. Urban orchards connect urban dwellers to nature and the food they eat. Many who grow their own food feel a closer connection to the earth.

Volunteer opportunities
Volunteers, in service to the community, become more aware and committed to a local site by helping to plant and care for trees, keeping the site clean and helping with the harvest.

Harvesting and food production
While urban orchards are seldom, if ever, commercially viable, they can provide substantial amounts of produce. They can provide organically grown food that is chemical free. Events such as picnics and cider pressings during the summer and fall bring residents together and offer a chance to relax, have fun, and enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Environmental Education
In conjunction with the Urban Orchards Program, our Outdoor Classrooms Program utilizes orchards planted in schoolyards to teach students about science and the environment and helps connect inner city youth with nature. Orchards are also a learning place for adults. Through such events as nature walks, orchard tours, and “learn and serve” work sessions, people connect with the nature that exists in their neighborhood. In horticultural courses with hands-on sessions in the orchards, participants have learned how to design, plant, and maintain an orchard and properly harvest the fruit.

For all the horticultural information you need to start and maintain an orchard, visit our horticultural manual.

Read about the history of EarthWorks' Urban Orchards Program to learn more about the opportunities and challenges of starting a similar program.

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