Better late than never, as they say. The Lammas Community Orchard dig day went off without a hitch (though I wasn’t the person running back and forth from their house with a wheelbarrow full of shovels!)
We got rolling with a whole lot of families and twenty trees to be divvied up and planted. The hard labour of digging holes had been done the weekend before, which meant people could mostly rock up, choose a tree, and get to planting. Each family was able to take a tree and responsibility for it – not only so they could always find their tree and watch it grow, but so we might be able to chase someone down with subtle pruning tips!
I find the question of ownership and assigning responsibility quite interesting. It was a way to engage with kids – saying, here, label your tree. I know that that helps to allow kids to feel like they’ve been a part of something. But I wonder to what extent bringing concepts of ownership into a community project might be counterproductive. And yet at the same time, it needs to remain tangible to people living in a time so obsessed with private property, ownership. The word ownership begs the question – how much does ownership have to do with private, and how much does it have to do with responsibility? Can we redefine terms and concepts going forward? La de da da da. This is my self-indulgent wah wah paragraph. Done.
Something I think we’ve learned throughout all our community growing projects is that kids. are into. GROWING. Even if parents are only mildly interested, if you show a child a plum tree without fruit and say “this is where plums come from, what to help them grow?” the kids will go wild.
We’ll hopefully be launching a blog or similar for this project in the next few weeks. I’m trying to come up with a way to make it sufficiently collaborative between all the families contributing to the orchard without… chaos ensuing. What’s more, I think most people would be pretty happy to crowd-source information on caring for native fruit trees. I’m thinking maybe a community Flickr and some sort of Word Press blog riffing off of our Community Garden blog, where participants can comment on individual tips posted every couple of weeks.
But if anyone has good examples of fostering on-line communities around real-life collective projects, it would be great to see them. Share share share.
