Trouble viewing? Click Here. We are just now finishing up our time here at Isis Oasis, the second stop on Fruit Tree Tour Orientation. On this property there are a number of fruit trees, some of which were originally planted by Luther Burbank, an American botanist, horticulturist and a pioneer in agricultural science who developed more than 800 strains and varieties of plants over his 55 year career beginning in 1872. Richard Channing, a resident at Isis Oasis offered to help us harvest cuttings from an old white fig tree that Luther Burbank planted on the property nearly 100 years ago. We climbed up in the fig to simultaneously prune the tree and take what was cut for further propagation of white fig trees across California at schools and communities. We will take these cuttings with us to plant at our Roots to Fruits Nursery at the Alpha Center in Santa Barbara where they will be cared for as they root and grow ready to be transplanted next year. We are super grateful for the opportunity to share these amazing strains of Figs with other fruit lovers. Thank you Isis Oasis!

In Castro Valley, just southeast of Oakland, an international humanitarian and spiritual leader Amritananda Mayi has a center on several hundred acres of grassy hillsides. As part of her Green Friends initiative (which plants 100,000 saplings along the coast India each year) she has begun a campaign to plant trees in the United States starting with the center’s grounds. Just after Fruit Tree Tour ended, 5 Common Vision crew members brought the fruit tree grafting skill that they developed on tour to propagate 108 apple and pear trees to support the project. The grafted trees will be used as part of a fund raiser to support the reforestation effort in the Castro Valley hills.

With the most packed schedule in Fruit Tree Tour history including more schools and community collaborations then ever before, the Common Vision crew successfully planted over 1000 fruit trees on the 2008 tour. In this short video, Professor Dingledorf, (a character in this year’s performance) leads the celebration of the 1000th tree going in to the ground at Hillside Elementary in the East bay. Students from Hillside support the celebration by writing and performing an eco-beats rhyme for the occasion. Video by Annapurna.

To make an order contact Faith ~ 530.277.1408 ~ faith[at]CommonVision.org

Tree Sales Location:

Thurs. April 8th @ Ukiah Natural Foods COOP, Ukiah
Fri. April 9th @ Mariposa, Willits

Sun. April 11th in Bay Area Location TBA

Wed. April 14th @ Briar Patch, Grass Valley
Thurs. April 15th @ Mother Truckers, North San Juan
Fri April 16th @ Willow Springs, North San Juan

Sat. April 17th @ Earth Day Event, Healdsberg
Sun. April 18th @ Ukiah Natural Foods COOP, Ukiah

2008 is the year for variety in Fruit Tree Tour's veggie oil powered refrigerator truck! Because of local nurseries like Rolling River in Orleans, wholesale nurseries such as Dave Wilson Nurseries and Sierra Gold who support planting fruit trees in school yards and community centers, our tree stewards have worked with over 65 different varieties of fruit trees. It's a tight squeeze getting all those bare-roots to fit in their winterized box-truck home! Luckily they move out quickly as we plant on average 20 trees per school. Trees of Antiquity surprised us with heirlooms like Tydeman's Late Orange Apple while SolMan Nursery in Encinitas donated our first 6 bananas in Fruit Tree Tour history! Through a large donation of fruiting vines, chain link fences surrounding many city schools will soon be dripping with Ruby Red and Monukka Grapes and Heyward kiwis. Having such a wide variety of trees allows for each school yard to experience fruit harvests throughout the school year. A school might have Loquats in April, Earlitreat Peach in May, Dapple Dandy Pluots in August; Emerald Beaut and Elephant Heart Plums in September, Fuji, Pink Lady and Granny Smith Apples in October, Fuyu Persimmons in November, Satsuma Tangerines in December, White Sapotes in January, Cherimoyas in February.. well, you get the picture.

What does it take to transform a schoolyard? This video created by tour veteran Annapurna takes us on the journey of planting an urban orchard at Jonas Salk Tech High from the perspective of the Fruit Tree Tour behind the scenes team--from the soil donation yard to planting site. Common Vision had the honor to work with a dynamic urban agriculture educational project, Soil Born Farms, on this planting. Catch a glimpse of how Common Vision joins forces with local organizations to meaningfully connect with students, schools, and communities.

Compton Unified School District brought Fruit Tree Tour to 4 schools in Compton this year to work with 1850 students and plant 75 trees. In this video made by return crew member and MC, Jah Sun Williams, school board member Marjorie Shipp explains why the program is important to her and to the City of Compton. George Washington Carver Elementary Principal Dr Jacqueline Sanderlin shares how Common Vision has inspired a whole new direction the landscape and integrated learning of the school. The video highlights the one of the most celebratory after-school drumming-dancing-tree planting school-yard transformations in tour history! Special Thanks to UrbanFarming.Org for sponsoring scholarships for Compton area schools for the second year in a row.

I think I should start my first Common Vision blog by being completely honest: I've had my doubts about grafting at the schools. And it's not because I don't think grafting is cool. Grafting is way cool. I mean, we take a little stick from one tree, slice into another tree, insert our little stick into the slice, wrap it with tape, slap some goop on it, and BAM! if it heals properly we got ourselves a brand new yummy fruit tree. But I've still had my doubts as I've wondered whether or not a group of 4th or 5th graders would really find this little miracle as interesting as me, the over-enthusiastic somewhat quirky long-haired tree-planting stranger.

Well, we've including grafting in the tree planting groups at two schools so far on FTT '08: Vista del Valle Elementary in Claremont and Birney Elementary in San Diego. At both schools I had the opportunity to facilitate three grafting workshops during which we would plant a rootstock tree and then graft the scion of a desired variety onto the rootstock. And I gotta admit I was a bit surprised when the students were really into it! I told them that the green layer inside the bark contains the new cell factory (cambium) and has the tubes (xylem and phloem) that work like the veins in our bodies, moving around all the stuff the tree needs to live. And our goal is to get the thin green layer of the rootstock to link up with the thin green layer of the yummy fruit branch. Even though we don't give the students knifes to slice the scion, they were intent on watching me closely making sure I was doing a good job preparing the graft. Since the students still have a tree planting experience when we plant the rootstock, the grafting is like a fun magic trick that we add on.

So, there's a video at the top of this blog if you haven't noticed it yet. It was taken by crew member Annapurna this past week at Birney Elementary in San Diego. I think it gives a good snapshot of a grafting group, in case any of you out there were wanting a small taste of what a day of Fruit Tree Tour might look like. I'm hoping to get more video uploaded soon with more tree planting, scenes from our green theater performance, drum workshops, creative expression session footage, and, hopefully, some behind the scenes footage of "Life on Tour." So make sure you keep checking back here, ok?

Tomorrow we begin the LA chapter of Fruit Tree Tour '08!

Lots of love from the road,

At this moment the 3 buses are rolling to the first San Diego school of the year. Having so far planted 75 trees in Joshua Tree, Claremont, and Orange County, the crew is ready to transform another schoolyard. Due to the generosity of our southern California nursery supporters, today's school will receive Banana, Sapote, Loquat, Lemon, Tangerine, Cherimoya, Guava, Nectarine, and Pear trees. The Cherimoya and citrus trees are riding in "Bu," the office bus, to school.

In the course of an afternoon, the Fruit Tree Tour crew learned how to graft loads of varieties onto one tree from Common Vision's newest super friend Joe Sabol. This video is a load of fun, don't miss it!



This video was created by Brian Flynn, a 3rd year returning volunteer and a crucial part of the project.

The Common Vision crew braved the high desert of Joshua Tree to train in the art of fruit tree planting, green theater, and inspiring the youth of California to care for the Earth. As part of a work trade with the Joshua Tree Retreat Center the crew planted 65 fig, olive, nectarine, pistachio, and pomegranate trees to the beat of ancient planting rhythms.

For the last 20+ years members of the California Rare Fruit Growers take great care to keep the DNA of many fruit trees alive and growing through their annual Scion Exchanges. Scions are pieces of trees cut to begrafted onto a rootstock, creating a new tree and passing on the DNA.
The Heritage Orchard in Santa Clara contains over 350 varieties of fruit trees used for scion wood. Michael, Blair, Koral and I all attended our first scion cutting party to learn all we could from the devoted fruit tree lovers.

In late December I had the pleasure of meeting with master gardeners John Berchielli and Caroline, caretaker of the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center near Sacramento. Here, master gardeners have been experimenting with strategies for growing fruit in small urban plots. These are the true scientists of what Common Vision refers to as Schoolyard Orchard Culture—the art of planting many trees close together to maximize number of fruit varieties and number of months that fruit is available in the limited space of the schoolyard. Schoolyard Orchard Culture uses maintenance strategies that keep the trees low to the ground for ladder-free student harvesting and easier caretaking.

The good folks at Dave Wilson Nurseries (donors to the Fruit Tree Tour) have pioneered these techniques and here at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center they have been testing them for the past decade. I came to talk to the experts on what will work best at schools across California. Here are some of the strategies that Fruit Tree Tour will be employing on this year’s tour:

Multiple Plantings (3-in-a-Hole): By planting three or four trees only feet from each other, we can, in the space of one full-sized tree, can have a peace, a nectarine, a plum, and an apricot. Or we can have three varieties of peach that ripen in May, August, and September, which means more months of students eating peaches for snacks instead of Doritos.

Espalier: Many schools have narrow patches of earth next to fence lines. In fact, for many schools this is the only pieces of dirt on the campus. Espalier is a technique that encourages lengthwise growth with little width. The effect is a fence or wall of fruit.

Cocktail Trees: Another strategy to maximize the schoolyard fruit varieties is the creation of cocktail trees. By grafting (> what is grafting) several varieties on one tree students can feast on apples from July until December on the same tree! One of the trees at Fair Oaks had over 50 varieties on one tree!

Caroline and the other caretakers of the center were excited to see their years of science going out to serve the public school children of California. They graciously invited me to cut scion wood from the trees in their orchard in order to graft cocktail trees at the each of the schools! Some May Apricots and September Pluots will certainly help to inspire the youth to choose nature’s sweetest candy, available every recess, free of charge!

When Fruit Tree Tour plants up a school, let's be honest, it looks like we stuck a bunch of leafless sticks in the ground. This October, I had an opportunity to see what happens just 2-1/2 years later, as I journeyed to eight Los Angeles school orchards. The growth and production was more than I thought possible in such a short time! Meeting with the principals and teachers, I offered pruning support and lessons and got to hear the stories of what the trees have been doing since we left. This video highlights "Orchard Updates" from two LA schools.

With Common Vision’s new bus on the way, Pre-tour Prep has officially begun! This time of year is special for the CV crew because we start witnessing miracle after miracle roll in! The time, energy and resources needed for Fruit Tree Tour to be the educational extravoganza that it turns into each year come in many different forms. One of the most exciting is …..Fruit Trees! This week CV received the first two tree donations for FTT 08.

Rolling River Nursery is as family farm as they come in Northern California. You can even read about their farm adventures on their website (RollingRiverNursery.com) as well as check out their amazing varieties of fruit trees, fruiting vines and bushes, natives, groundcovers…. the list goes on. Rolling River has generously offered at least 50 fig trees for this years tour! I look forward to visiting the homestead for the fruit tree pick up!

Our second tree donation comes from Solman Fruit Trees (Solman.com). Marcus Bakula will hook Fruit Tree Tour up again in 08 with the ever popular cherimoya tree! He lovingly propagates delicious fruit trees in Encinitas, CA and in 05 CV planted his cherimoyas in the center of our first Fruit Orchard Mandala at Normandie Elementary. This year our friends from CSU reported 4 cherimoyas from that tree! Cherimoyas also happens to be a long-standing FTT crew favorite- we play drums and dance for baskets full of them at the Santa Barbara Farmers Market each year! Marcus and friends are at it again this year bringing more ‘moyas to the youth and throwing in some Brazillian dwarf bananas and Venus grapes.

Big thanks to the first tree donors of 08. The CV crew is honored to bring the generousity of our supporters into the hands of California’s youth. We are on our way to 1,000 more fruit trees for 2008!

The California Rare Fruit Growers is an inspiring organization that over the past three years has played a pivotal role in the Fruit Tree Tour. The organization is an eclectic group of hobbyists, backyard growers, government and university researchers, nurserymen and commercial growers that focus on growing fruit varieties that are not commonly grown commercially. They have been instrumental in diversifying the fruit varieties that Common Vision plants at the schools and extending the number of months that students can pick fruit from trees in their schoolyard.

This year Common Vision will be working hand-in-hand with several members of the Rare Fruit Growers to make possible the Fruit Tree Tour Nursery Rroject. The goal of the project is to grow 1000 trees a year that will provide schools from San Diego to Sacramento with fruiting trees that have delicious fruit of numerous varieties to harvest in ALL months of the school season. Stay tuned for more as this project develops!


Steven Spangler of the San Diego CRFG chapter and owner of Exotica Nursery has provided Fruit Tree Tour with an incredible mix of banana, tropical cherry, guava, fig, and cherimoya varieties that have been planted at schools throughout LA.

Each year Jerry Price also of the San Diego chapter has provided a workshop each year for the crew on tree care and planting and has been Common Vision’s go-to guy on all of our tree care questions.

Joe Sabol of the Central Coast CRFG chapter has run a High School Grafting Program where every spring he teaches students at 30 schools across the central coast to graft there own apple trees. This program has helped over 10,000 students to graft trees since 1998. This year he will be running a workshop for the Fruit Tree Tour crew to increase the crew’s grafting and teaching capacity for the Roots-to-Fruits Program.

Mark Alpert of the Mendocino CRFG chapter donated over fifty pineapple guava seedlings and hundreds of Jujube (Chinese dates) seeds last year which are growing in Santa Barbara area currently waiting patiently until they are old enough to go to school with the Fruit Tree Tour.


John Valenzuela currently of the Bay Area CRFG Chapter has been a key guide in the development of the Fruit Tree Tour Nursery Project plan. As an elder in the permaculture (sustainable design) movement, John is always suggesting innovative ways to do the least work for the most gain and to make the best use of local resources.

How does Common Vision’s veggie-oil powered caravan carry 1,000 fruit trees for 3 months? Bare-rooted, dormant, cold, and moist in a 20’ long vegetable-oil powered refrigerator on wheels, of course… Taking proper care of all these trees while on the road is no small task. Fruit Tree Tour volunteer Brenda Whitney has taken on the responsibility with ceaseless dedication for the past two years. Our beloved Tree Steward now reveals to the world what caring for all these trees entails.

Each tree planted on Fruit Tree Tour passes through the hands of the crew's Tree Stewards numerous times before being planted at a school in a workshop with students. This year the Tree Steward role is being filled by a dynamic trio of women: April, Koral, and myself, Brenda. As the sole Steward last tour, I am grateful for the shared responsibilities this year, as well as the opportunity to return again and learn even more about the trees we plant.

The job is a quiet, behind the scenes, daily commitment that requires watering the trees morning and night, as well as pulling out a school's "order" for trees to be planted during the next day's program. Thankfully it can be done alone, or together, any time of day or night, and can be a peaceful meditation. Sometimes it requires driving with Maggie, one of the crew's original Tree Stewards, in the refrigerator truck to pick up trees being donated by a nursery. It is always exciting to see where our trees come from, and meet the people who are giving them to Common Vision for the Fruit Tree Tour schools. It's a joy to see the inside of the truck filled with another 50-300 trees waiting to be planted at schools.
We store all our bare-root fruit trees in a large refrigerator truck in order to keep them at a temperature below 45 F, which keeps them in dormancy (or asleep) as they are in winter time. The inside of the truck has been built up with wood to create a trough for the trees to live in, and lined with waterproof material for watering. We pull the trees out 24 hours in advance of planting them at school, to allow them time to acclimate to the climate outside. Its fun to tell the students during planting that they are not only giving the trees a permanent home, but also helping to ‘wake up' the trees, making them think its spring, and time to start growing.

Sometimes the caravan will carry up to an additional 50 potted trees of varieties that don’t go dormant or that don’t store well bare rooted. Citrus, Loquats, Cherimoya, Tropical Cherries, Pineapple Guavas, Sapote, and the Ice Cream Bean all need to be carried in pots. On days when the caravan rolls to a new location, we load all of the potted tree into one of our truck beds, and unload them at the next campsite.

I've been learning a lot more this year about the trees. As a Midwest and East-coast transplant to California, I've been learning a lot of new interesting varieties, such as the Cherimoya and Loquat. I’ve been reveling in the abundance of fruit that grows well in this region, but only comes as rare treats back home, such as citrus, figs, and avocados. I've also been learning a lot more about tree care, including pruning, grafting, irrigating, and planting regionally-specific varieties. We also keep an inventory of all the trees planted at each school, to keep a record of the orchards we leave behind each year, and to be better able to check up on their progress throughout the year as the schools continue to care for them.

Each time I plant a tree with the kids, or in the program's closing circle, I think of all the love and care that went into bringing that tree to that school, and the number of times I visited and held that tree before leaving it in its new home with the kids. We usually circle around the tree at the end of each planting, and make a parting wish; I often think of how grateful I am for such an abundance of fruit, of my role in helping to spread that abundance, and of my desire for these students to find as much joy in bringing the abundance of nature to their communities as I do.

While each seed in an apple core will grow into a fruiting apple tree given the right conditions, only very rarely will the tree produce large and sweet (or even palatable) fruit like the apple from which the seed came. The only way to ensure the quality and character of the fruit is to cut a branch off a tree with the quality of fruit that you desire. This little branch (or scion) has several nodes out of which future branches and buds may grow.

All the little branch needs to grow an entire tree out of one of these little nodes is a steady flow of sap. Grafting is the art of attaching the sap flowing (or cambium) layer of the little branch to the sap flowing (or cambium) layer of a tree with roots. With a few careful cuts and some tape the little branch of the desired fruit variety becomes one tree with its new roots and grows into a full sized tree. Grafting is the method used for the propagation of most common fruit trees.

Common Vision is piloting “Roots to Fruits - School Nurseries to Feed Communities” at 3-4 schools on this year’s Fruit Tree Tour. Common Vision works with the students and teachers to propagate a nursery of 50 – 200 saplings of varieties of fruits that are especially requested and adapted for school plantings in their area. Common Vision educators demonstrate the process of grafting fruit trees (see Grafting 101 below). Students witness and participate in one of the most amazing miracles in nature, the combining of two trees to give both strong roots and delicious fruits. Common Vision gives students the charge to care for the young trees for two years. These trees can then be planted at community centers, neighborhoods in their area and shared with more schools during Fruit Tree Tours to come.

Common Vision’s first “Roots to Fruits” nurseries:

Vista Del Valle Elementary
3 years and 33 fruit trees deep in Fruit Tree Tour participation Vista was honored to be the first Roots to Fruits Nursery. They are caring for 50 grafted apples and 20 rooting fig cuttings.

North Hollywood High School
Under the guidance of soil science teacher Randy Vail, the students in the Naturalist Academy – an environmental track at North Hollywood High, will be hosting the largest Roots to Fruits Nursery. There nursery is holding 50 apples, 100 grape, and 100 fig trees for Fruit Tree Tour. Additionally they gifted Common Vision with 20 4 year old Cherimoya trees. Big thanks for this budding collaboration.