Planting the first tree

Sustainability is hard work.  Toiling in the garden everyday sounds fun, but the idea of having a few trees that will give food with little effort sounds fun as well.  My family and I drink fresh orange juice all the time.  We also eat quite a few peeling oranges.  All that said, we thought an orange tree would be a good first step toward our urban sustainability farm.  Ha ha.  We go to the local farmer's market and get a 25lb bag of valencias for $16 bucks.  That makes close to two gallons of fresh juice which lasts us a week to ten days.  If the market eludes us, we hit the grocery up for a half gallon at the tune of $9 bucks.  So, let's do a little math equation.  Being very conservative and saying we only buy farmer's market oranges once a month.  Then completely leaving out store bought juice from this equation, we spend $192 a year on orange juice.  I walked up the street to Armstrong's and found a healthy tree and a bag of compost soil for a total of $77.66.  Not bad.

So, I got back to my little strip of land and I wasn't alone.  There was a guy sitting up against the back side of the Auto Repair shop eating his lunch.  He saw me coming with the tree and moved out of the way.  To his surprise I stopped right in front of him and unloaded the tree from my cart.  He looked at me, I looked at him and said that the tree will look great right here.  He smiled and picked up my other shovel and began to help me dig the hole.  His name is Leonel.  I remembered his name very easily because I'm really into "Kings of Leon" right now.  We put the tree in and it looks great!  


As Leonel's time on break came to an end, his work mates came over to see what was going on.  I had just trimmed the tree behind the orange tree and there were a bunch of branches still on the ground.  The two new guys asked me if I needed help picking them up and before I had a chance to say no, they cleaned them up.  We introduced ourselves, shook hands and smiled.  Thanks William and Fred.  I am already overwhelmed by the sense of community that it starting to grow.