The Community Orchard Program: A New Branch of Project Pando

In this installment of Get to Know Project Pando, Nora sits down with our very own EB about a new Project Pando initiative that has already begun to take root. Pun intended. Hint: It has to do with food!

Project Pando aims to connect people with trees. Those of us who have followed or participated in this journey since 2017 are aware that Project Pando is a community-driven organization. Over the last six years, its primary activity has been collecting seeds and growing thousands of young trees from more than 100 different native species. And then, Pando happily gives most of them away to organizations and individuals who wish to be part of restoring our sub/urban spaces to diverse and native habitats.

The Pando nursery will continue to grow native trees, but today I am excited to announce the addition of our second program, which will continue to connect people with trees through community orchards. We plan to plant community orchards across Raleigh, Durham, Cary, and many other cities that form the Triangle.

Nora: What started you on this journey, EB?

EB: In 2020, we partnered with Triangle Land Conservancy to steward 17 acres at the Williamson Preserve, east of Raleigh. We were blessed to find huge thickets of Chickasaw plums growing wild on this site. I was amazed at how these trees produced a bounty of fruit every year without any help from us. I was curious whether other native trees and shrubs do the same. I started learning more about food-producing trees and shrubs. I’ve been doing some experiments at “Pandoland,” such as grafting persimmons, and planting pecans and blueberries.

I’ve eaten some of those plums. They are delicious. I planted the seeds from some of the plums I ate, and now they are growing in my yard! How did your interest in learning about native food trees develop into this major initiative?

I kept thinking that trees that can provide food would connect even more people with trees. After all, lots of people like trees, but everyone likes to eat! It really seemed like something that could capture the imagination of many people.

It wasn’t until I found The Giving Grove and contacted them in early 2024 that things started to take off. Late last year, Project Pando became a new affiliate within The Giving Grove Network. With their support, we were able to start this community orchard program.

The Giving Grove sounds a lot like Project Pando; repairing and improving the sub/urban ecosystem, community-facing, but with food! Sounds like a perfect fit. So, this new Pando program is more than just one orchard, right?

Oh, yes, much more. We plan to revitalize or help plant 250 public orchards in Raleigh, Durham, and all the other communities in the Triangle region. A network of orchard stewards will manage these orchards. We will organize ongoing training sessions and workshops to build a community of capable orchardists. These stewards will also learn more about native ecology. The key to healthy, bountiful orchards is healthy soil and a diversity of native plants, insects, and animals!

That’s a lot of orchards! Is there a specific size for them?

The smallest would be 5 or 6 trees, but we can go much bigger if a site allows. We’ve already connected with UCAN (Urban Community AgriNomics) in North Durham to help them plant an apple orchard. They collaborated with the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources to locate original handwritten documents that listed the apple cultivars grown on the site in the 1800s. We were able to find these same cultivars to plant in this new orchard. That has been an exciting project.

I can truly see the community connections at work here. The Giving Grove to Pando to UCAN. This could really go far. It makes me think of trees connected in a forest. What kind of trees would these orchards contain?

They can be any trees or shrubs that provide food as long as they are not invasive. It makes a lot of sense to focus on native plants because, obviously, they grow well here; however, they don’t necessarily have to be native. Fig is a good example. Figs grow well here, and they don’t need a lot of coddling, provide good food, and aren’t invasive. Not necessarily just food either: it could also include trees that offer other valuable items, such as medicine, teas, or dyes.

While we would love to plant only native trees and shrubs, unfortunately, most of our diets are non-native. We can slowly change that. We envision a food system that is more localized, incorporating more perennial trees and shrubs, and that utilizes native plants to provide food for both humans and the broader ecosystem. A food system like this would make a tremendous difference in many of our planetary issues.

What native trees or shrubs could be in such an orchard?

I mentioned Chickasaw plums and blueberries. Persimmons, mulberries, and pawpaw come easily to mind. Black walnuts and hickories too.

You can eat black walnuts?

Yep! If you know how to prepare them. There is some almost-lost lore on harvesting and preparing native nuts that we don’t think of as food in the modern day.

I met a gentleman whose family had a farm near the airport. They had crops, a vegetable garden, orchards, and chickens — all the things traditional farms used to have.

The farm has mostly been turned into suburbs. None of the food production exists anymore, except for two old walnut trees. The thing about these old walnut trees is that they’ve survived even after the rest of the farm has long gone. They still produce an abundance of nuts. And this farmer still gathers and prepares these nuts. He still knows how to prepare them. This year, he collected the nuts for me, and we processed them together. They are drying in my basement as we speak, and I have been slowly cracking them out and eating the nuts. This is the kind of knowledge we want to preserve and revitalize.

This truly ignites the imagination. There is food all around us if we only knew about it and understood how to utilize it. I can clearly envision how cultivating food trees in public spaces would not only help restore our suburban environments but also heal communities and provide meaningful work and hope for individuals as well. I can’t wait to see where this leads us.