Volunteers spend Earth Day in Fairfield’s fruit orchard

FAIRFIELD - A group of Fairfield volunteers spent Earth Day getting down and dirty, working on the town's fruit orchard that just turned eight years old.

The fruit orchard was inaugurated on Earth Day in 2012, and is located just east of Chautauqua Park on the east side of town. On Wednesday, April 22, a group of five volunteers in the morning and another five in the afternoon worked at the orchard spreading mulch around the base of the trees and installing cages to protect them from animals. The volunteers were working on 16 trees that had to be moved within the orchard to accommodate sanitary sewer construction that's occurring nearby.

During construction, the contractor had to cut down a number of trees in the timber, and turned all those trees into mulch, which Wednesday's volunteers were able to spread around the fruit trees.

Austen Troutt, the orchard's main volunteer, said mulch provides a number of benefits to trees. It maintains moisture in the soil and suppresses weed growth. As it ages and breaks down, it provides nutrients the trees can feed on.

Troutt said that five volunteers working at once might not seem like a lot, but in fact they were able to accomplish an impressive amount of work Wednesday.

'We can get a lot done with just a few people,” Troutt said.

The orchard used to receive a lot of volunteer attention a few years ago when Fairfield hosted a Green Iowa AmeriCorps office, which organized a number of work parties to maintain the trees. That office closed in 2018 when it was relocated to another city in Iowa.

The orchard was started by Scott Timm, who was then Fairfield's Sustainability Coordinator, a position that has since been eliminated. At the time, the orchard boasted just under 100 trees of all different types such as chestnuts, apples, pears, persimmons, aronia, English walnuts, black walnuts and hazelnuts.

The fruit trees got off to a rocky start. Troutt said that, for the first few years after they were planted, the city experienced a heavy drought. And with no watering system in place, some of the trees died. Some were eaten by deer, and others succumbed to fire blight.

The volunteers installed new cages around the trees, which stop creatures such as deer from eating them. Deer don't just eat the tree. Bucks can damage young trees by brushing their antlers on them, stripping off the bark. Once a tree is older, its bark is thicker and the deer's antlers don't damage it so much.

Troutt said all the fruit trees in the orchard are mature enough to produce fruit, except the walnut trees. Unfortunately, last year was a bad year for fruit because the prior winter was so severe.

'We have a lot of flowers on the trees this year, however,” Troutt said. 'We're expecting a good harvest.”

Members of the public are invited to pick fruit they see on the trees.

'My hope would be that everybody is mindful that other people will want to grab some fruit as well,” Troutt said. 'I would discourage people from harvesting a bunch in a bucket all for themselves.”

Though the orchard's production has been modest thus far, if it produces as well as Troutt is expecting this year and the years to come, he said the excess fruit will be donated to food pantries like The Lord's Cupboard.