Introducing our new Mobile Orchards
This spring we’re excited to roll out our new mobile orchards!
Our project sprung from the need to bring fruit trees and green spaces to communities in need without pushing them out of the space through inadvertently driving up market prices and gentrifying the area. Our solution came in the shape of up-cycled planter boxes that were transportable, meaning we could relocate the trees to follow families or remove them from a neighborhood if rent prices began to climb.
Our boxes use up-cycled juniper wood to help combat the tree's invasive behavior in Oregon's grasslands (learn more about this issue here X), and are split into two parts.
The first portion is a shallow garden bed where the community is involved in the curation of fruits and vegetables. In order to serve the communities best we ensure we are planting produce they want to see, and take part in education on how to care for, glean, and cook them for those who are less familiar. Our second half, the orchards portion, is a deeper bed that hosts a dwarf tree that can grow up 6-9 feet tall.
Both garden beds were designed and built by our intern, Amethyst, and were built to thrive in an outdoor space through its use of super resilient Juniper wood. The boxes include space for water reservoirs, overflow channels, gravel, geo-textiles, and soil to best support the trees.
We hope that with our new mobile orchards that we can more effectively create a space where communities in need have access to fresh fruit and the resources to learn to care for and curate gardens. We will continue to expand our mobile orchards and plan to add more trees to encourage cross pollination and a wider variety of produce, as well as bring them to more communities and neighborhoods.
Our first installation is going up April 24-25th, in both a plot on Alberta ave, and in the common space of Orchards on 82nd, a ROSE CDC property. We hope to get the public involved both through a livestream of our planting, and through a tree naming contest- submit your tree name suggestions to the survey below!