Serviceberry tree ripening on East Lake Dr. in Oakhurst

If you haven’t had serviceberries, they’re not too far from a blueberry and they grow all of the place, thanks to our dear friends at Trees Atlanta.

Our record for most serviceberries donated is about 80 lbs., set in 2011. Help us beat it this year! Sign up for one or many picks in the sidebar on the right.

Dog Head Farm:
1117 Birch St
Atlanta, GA 30310

See you there!

For reference, the English Avenue Historic District is where one of our mini orchards went in a few weeks ago. It is a 5 minute drive from the Georgia Dome, has probably 10% of its houses boarded up, and when HELP did a survey of 500 men in the neighborhood, 420 of them were Vietnam veterans. It is a different Atlanta over there, and I highly recommend you visit. It is an eye-opening experience, especially in light of the current discussions surrounding hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars soon to be spent on a new dome.

We will be meeting at the Techwood Community Garden at 2pm on Sunday. We’ll be meeting folks from Atlanta Union Mission, and together carpooling from there to English Ave. Please come out!

We probably could not have picked a worse day for planting a bunch of trees, but c’est la vie. There were about 9 of us altogether, and we got 15 trees in the ground in 3 different locations in about 2 hours. Not bad! They will soon appear on the food map, but we had 2 persimmons, 2 figs, 3 pears, 6 apples, and 2 plums go in.

We cannot thank our volunteers enough for doing manual labor on the coldest day in a long time, and we owe much gratitude to those of you whose donations made these mini orchards possible in the first place. Thank you all so much!

We may have also recently received a small cache of fruit trees unexpectedly donated to us, so we will hopefully have some more orchard projects in the near future. Stay tuned!

Woohoo! 23 new fruit trees from the ALFI fruit tree sale, purchased with your donations! Thank you all so much!

We got:
3 Arkansas black apples
1 Fuji apple
2 Gala apples
1 Stayman apple
1 Dorset Golden apple
1 Anna apple
1 Celeste fig
1 LSU Purple fig
1 Moonglow pear
1 Asian pear
1 Kieffer pear
1 Hanna-Fuyu persimmon
1 Methley plum
1 Bruce plum
2 Damson plums
1 Alapaha blueberry
1 Powderblue blueberry
1 Premier blueberry (ooh la la)
1 Britewell blueberry

We’ll be having a planting event foe these guys and gals next Sunday most likely. Details are coming, and thanks again y’all!

The neighborhood has been extremely enthusiastic and supportive. In fact, passersby we chatted with often complained that they didn’t know if they would be able to eat ripe fruit from the trees because everyone would pick them clean and eat all the fruit before it ripened. I heard this as a challenge to plant enough trees to out-grow the neighborhood’s demand for fruit.

We have been offered a few other lots to plant fruit trees on in the same neighborhood. While we dot our i’s and cross our t’s with the details, keep an eye open for chances to help us out in the future with this new and rewarding venture. And extra special thanks to all those that chipped in to get us the money we needed to make this possible!

Dog Head Farms

The biggest organizational change that we made in 2012 is the creation of our 1 acre organic farm, Dog Head Farms, in Sylvan Hills. It started as a kudzu-covered field, and is now a kudzu-covered field that also produces food (400 lbs in 2012). It was a very different direction for Concrete Jungle — fruit foraging is a logistics-intensive, transient activity that is (so far) hard to organize on a large scale or for many groups. Farms stay put, and always got stuff to be done.

Dog Head’s Precarious Occupation

For those of you not fully in the know, Dog Head Farms is situated on land to which we only partially have legitimate access. The farm consists of 4 lots, and 3 of them have been long abandoned. The remaining lot belongs to a benefactor of Concrete Jungle. While we worry about losing part of our farm to these absent property owners at some point in the future, we have several factors that we hope (fingers crossed) will make that unlikely:

• The city likely has a tax lien on the properties.
• At least one of the lots is owned by a dissolved corporation.
• The outstanding tax bill for many of the lots is larger than the assessed value of the land. Were the land to go to tax auction, the opening bid is usually the outstanding tax bill, which is unlikely to be met.
• The area as a whole is not amenable to development: the creek running through the farm has a 50 foot (I believe) negative easement preventing development, and the sewer access in the middle of the property also has a 30 foot radius (I believe) negative easement preventing development.

And so the land has sat for many years, in kudzu-covered limbo. We’re trying our best to rehabilitate it. If any one reading this happens to know some way to resolve this situation in our favor, we’d love to hear it.

Abandoned Land in Atlanta

What the Dog Head Farms land situation brought to light is that there is likely a very large amount of similar abandoned lots in Atlanta, and it is even more likely that these properties are in low-income parts of the city.

This allows us to expand on what Concrete Jungle does. Up till now, we have been picking fruit that is going to waste all over Atlanta, and delivering to the hungry and homeless and low-income parts of the city. Maybe we should start planting public orchards on abandoned land, and simply grow that fruit right where it’s needed.

Are we giving up on fruit picking? Absolutely not. Fruit picking is our bread and butter. We donated more fruit last year than ever before, and we’re looking forward to getting even more. Fruit picking is also weird and fun and unpredictable, and is a great outlet for creative problem solving (I swear 2013 will be the year of the fruit-tree-spotting drone).

Why public orchards and not farms? Well, we’ve learned from running Dog Head that farms are a lot of work. It’s fine and fun to have Dog Head, but expanding it many times over throughout the city seems unfeasible, especially given the all-too-common sight of overgrown and untended beds at community gardens around the city.

Orchards will deliver far more food for far less input than a farm, and they will hopefully contribute to improving the surrounding neighborhood by turning an eyesore of an abandoned lot in to an amenity.

Don’t orchards take a long time to grow? Yes, yes they do. But so does everything. We believe that Atlanta has shown itself as a city whose citizens can be excited about long-term projects. We hope only to add to this excitement, and to feed the general sentiment that so many Atlantans have: that things are getting better around here, and that there’s a lot of cool stuff on the horizon.

Our First Orchard Project and The World’s Smallest Fundraising Campaign

With that, we hope to launch our first public orchard project with the partnership of HELP, in the English Avenue neighborhood just west of the Georgia Dome and just blocks away from Martin Luther King Jr’s house. HELP is leading a Hands-On Atlanta volunteer day to clean up two lots on Elm St. this coming Monday. In February, we will purchase fruit trees from the ALFI Fruit Tree Sale, and they will go in to the ground shortly thereafter.

Our goal for this orchard is to raise $200. That’s it. Compared to those NPR pledge drives, this is a walk in the park. $20 gets us a tree, and $200 will allow us to purchase enough trees that some type of fruit should be ripe or ripening throughout the entire growing season, resulting in many hundreds of pounds of fresh food over the life of the tree. Please consider donating to us. Your money is going directly towards feeding people and improving Atlanta.

We did it yall! There was a last minute call from waayyy up in Alpharetta to get an unidentifiable fruit — they weren’t quite sure if it was an apple or a pear. It turned out to be a gigantic Asian pear tree, easily loaded with 400+ lbs of fruit. We shook them all out down in to a ditch in the darkness, and loaded up our bags without needing any light — one could just feel in the darkness and find endless fruit on the ground.

We may even make it to 10,500 this year, but we wanted to knock out some of the sorting and donation early on so we could cross the line ASAP.

Thanks for all your help this year everyone! As a friend pointed out, 10,000 lbs has got to be at least 43 baby elephants.

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That’s a lot of food right?