Bio-fueled fleet takes Emmy Award-winning Common Vision crew on 8th annual tree-planting roadshow – CALIFORNIA 1st March

This week, the “Tastiest Show on Earth” will return to low-income California communities with a larger-than-life musical message about local food security and a bare-root roadshow that will leave a statewide trail of schoolyard orchards in its wake. Since 2003, Common Vision’s Fruit Tree Tour has planted over 4,300 fruit trees and counting at low-income schools and community centers throughout California.

Now in its 8th season, the Emmy Award-winning tour has hit the road again to take its backwoods brand of green theater to urban youth at public schools throughout San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento and California’s Central Coast. In this year’s show, a magic gardener, talking worms and a local-yokel circus of tool-twirling acrobats and fruit-tossing jugglers teach a young student named Suzy how to downsize her carbon footprint by planting a fruit tree and composting the core to complete the cycle.

The theatrical tree-planting troupe will travel the Golden State aboard Common Vision’s caravan of bio-powered buses, the world’s largest known straight vegetable oil (SVO)-powered fleet.

Decked out with rooftop solar arrays and styled for maximum sustainability, Fruit Tree Tour’s fleet rolls with two 40-foot custom coaches that the cast and crew call home during their two-month tree-planting pilgrimage. The hand-painted busses sport enough bunk beds to sleep all 20 of the modern-day Johnny Appleseeds on tour, a commercial kitchen to feed them three organic meals a day, and an on-board office to manage the massive mobile operation.

A special refrigerated truck, also rigged to run on used fry oil, delivers the hundreds of dormant bare-root fruit trees needed to keep up with the tour’s nearly non-stop planting and performance schedule.

In a new program named “No Tree Left Behind” the Common Vision crew is returning to tend plantings from previous tours such as two 75-tree orchards in South Central Los Angeles at John Muir Middle School and Normandie Avenue Elementary. From drip irrigation to micro-life inoculation, arborists are on hand to teach students, faculty and their families about orchard care techniques that can help their trees yield untold tons of fresh, free fruit for a hundred years or more.

“Fresh fruit is a gateway food,” shares tour director Megan Watson. “There is wisdom in the old saying about an apple a day keeping the doctor away. An industrial diet of processed foods is making American kids unnaturally sick and fat, resulting in a national epidemic of childhood diabetes and obesity. We hope that every fruit tree we plant will give countless kids to come an early opportunity to start making healthy choices in life.”

“Once upon a time, orchards and gardens were commonplace on public school campuses,” shares education director Michael Flynn. “Economic uncertainty is inspiring more American communities to get back to basics like growing food. With rising prices and falling wages, it’s a no brainer to plant orchards able to provide tons of free fruit for years to come.”

Fruit Tree Tour 2011 is sponsored by Organic Valley, Nutiva, Forever Flowering Greenhouses, BioLogic Systems, Vital Landscaping, and Sierra Gold Nurseries.

For more information, please visit CommonVision.org.