Community & School orchard project
Help us create community and school orchards this planting season. We have many locations that we are supporting in creating orchards
see map and need your support. The fruit we plant is all from traditional varieties and is supplied through a specialist supplier of wonderful stock.
Click here to see us talking to him about the best way to plant out fruit trees.
The Benefits of our school and orchard projects are many:
- Improved biodiversity with wonderfully fragrant flowers in the spring attracting lots of pollinators.
- Where possible we work with the community and our volunteers to create wildflower meadows around the base of the orchards. This is both aesthetically pleasing but also improves biodiversity by encouraging butterflies, insects, and pollinators whilst also creating a community space that can be enjoyed by the school children or the community.
- There are clear mental health and well-being benefits for those involved in planting and looking after orchards and growing areas and One Planet Matters provides information guides on maintenance and pruning.
- The orchards will produce fruit that will feed into the wider Growing Communities Network which means fruit from the trees will be used to support others in the locality such as food banks, care homes, and others. Through local surveys, we ask the community to identify groups within their locality that they want to support, such as food banks, care homes, single mother cooking clubs, etc.
- In a school & urban setting the orchard can be used by teachers as an outside teaching aid and can be seen as an important link in helping children understand where the food they see in supermarkets comes from
- We also hope that it will engender an interest in growing.
Our project has been created to be environmentally and socially positive. Help us buy the materials we need to plant even more orchards or just support the orchards that are in your locality. Thank you
