As spring nears and greenery returns to Lawrence, one organization is looking to enrich the city and bring people together by planting a crop often overlooked in urban environments—fruit trees.
Lawrence Fruit Tree Project, founded in 2008, not only provides community members with the opportunity to pick free, fresh fruit grown in a local orchard but also spreads gardening knowledge and connects people through their volunteer sessions and workshops.
The Orchard
The project aims to increase the number of fruit trees around Lawrence, increasing accessibility to fresh, nutritional food and making people feel more connected to the nature that surrounds them. Lawrence Community Orchard actualizes these goals by creating a space where individuals can get involved with the growing and care of these plants and eventually harvest fruit as a result of their hard work.
Skyler Adamson, the Lawrence Community Orchard Coordinator and founder of the project, said that the orchard’s multifaceted goals allow for unique connections to be formed around gardening education.
“On its face, we’re feeding people, but we also want to provide the resources and knowledge so that people can replicate orchards on their own property or with their own group, so it’s a learning orchard,” Adamson said. “But it’s also a place to connect people and have fun and connect people with the environment.”
The orchard boasts over 100 plants, representing around 30 different species, including figs, Asian pears, and autumn olives. Adamson said that he plants designated species that would be easiest for beginner gardeners to grow so that they have the confidence to grow them on their own.
“The orchard is designed to show every productive woody perennial that you can grow here in northeast Kansas with very little maintenance with things that are highly pest and disease resistant is the focus—things that are very hands-off,” Adamson said, “because I want to encourage people’s success in growing.”
Community Building
The orchard relies heavily on volunteers to maintain the area through tasks such as planting, pruning, digging garden beds, and building fences.
Mark King, a regular orchard volunteer, said that he had a little bit of experience with growing fruit trees in his hometown of Charleston, Virginia, and was excited to discover a Lawrence organization where he could continue his hobby and learn skills such as pruning and grafting.
King said that the volunteer days and workshops at the orchard help to bring together a variety of individuals with activities that everyone can enjoy.
“On a volunteer day, there’s all ages of people there, from me and even older to children,” King said. “We’ve done a few workshops with children where we took the cider press, a friend and I own an apple cider press, and let the kids both press and drink the fresh juice, so things like that are really fun.”
Foraging and Food Deserts
Lawrence Fruit Tree Project and Community Orchard operate as a program of the Sunrise Project, fulfilling Sunrise’s goal of forming a community around food and education. Sunrise Project executive director Melissa Freiburger said that the orchard provides a one-of-a-kind space for individuals to gather and collect their own food in an area where fresh food is less accessible.
“I think that Lawrence Community Orchard does fill a gap [in Lawrence], I mean, we’re over here in East Lawrence. We’re in a food desert,” Freiburger said. “There’s very few public spaces in our community where you can go and just be there and pick food, so I think that definitely is something unique.”
Across the nation, foraging has seen a resurgence as individuals have been spending more time outside and, as a result of the pandemic, have felt inclined to become more sustainable and self-sufficient. King said that he had collected fruit from the orchard in the past and has been able to both eat it fresh and preserve it using various methods.
“Personally, I’ve gotten some stuff, and we do some canning and some jelly making,” King said. “There’s fruit there being eaten both out of hand and sometimes in enough bounty that you could make some jam or jelly.”
On the whole, Adamson said that he thinks the orchard not only provides the community with food but also allows people to become more connected with nature by offering fruit trees and the orchard as easy access points for interactions with the natural world. A Lawrence full of fruit trees, he said, is the Lawrence that he wants to live in.
“I just thought that urban agriculture and urban orchards are a very humanizing aspect of any urban cityscape and I wanted to create the Lawrence, Kansas, that I thought would benefit everybody, and for me, that was having a city full of public fruit trees and people connected through and by urban orchards.”
Follow Lawrence Fruit Tree Project to hear about volunteer opportunities and know when fruit can be harvested.
