Change Food

Artist Sam Van Aken has kindly offered to donate one of his Tree of 40 Fruit to La Casita Verde, an innovative green space in the South Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY.  La Casita Verde is a mix of urban farm, community center and R&D laboratory. Central to the mission is building a place for the local community to come together and learn through doing about the soil food web.  It was founded by media artists and professors Stefani Bardin + Brooke Singer.

The Tree of 40 Fruit is a hybrid tree hand grafted by Sam Van Aken that yields 40 different types of heirloom varieties of stone fruits.  He gave a short talk about it at TEDxManhattan 2014 (see clip above). The tree will be a beautiful addition to La Casita Verde's living lab but more importantly it will be used to educate the community about seed saving, heirloom cultivars and the hundreds of varieties of fruits and vegetables that aren't available to the public through industrial food production.

 

To bring the tree to Brooklyn, $2,500 is needed to cover the cost of transporting it from Syracuse.  You can help make this happen!   Donors will be invited to help harvest the fruit.