One Done and Many Begun

Let there be no pause before we send our immense gratitude to all of the donors on Kickstarter.com this spring! We are happy to report that our goal was reached last Friday, thanks to many donations of all sizes. We worked together, and we did it! Thank you for helping us reach 1,000 students this year through educational exhibits that will remain in their orchards for many more years--and many more students--to come.

A list of the generous donors who made this campaign a success! 

So, now that our campaign is done, many more projects have begun!

Yesterday, we broke ground on our nursery and planted the first row of trees to be installed in future school orchards. Today, the planting continues!

We will finish much of the preparation for our nursery, as well as for our farm stand, during Maine's upcoming April Vacation Week. The next week promptly marks the beginning of our educational programming with this year's participating schools, and April 26-27 are our orchard installation days!

Many thanks to Adams County Nursery for enabling us begin our first round of school orchards with mature and beautiful trees; to Skillins Greenhouses for the compost, mulch and other soil amendments which will make it possible to grow our own fruit trees for future schools; to NGA and Home Depot for the essential fencing and other materials which will create a sustainable nursery, farm stand and orchard program for children and families; to Votenet Solutions and their clients, funding the planting of hundreds of trees this year and in years to come; to Fertil USA for making our trees easy to plant at home for gardeners supporting our program; to Two Epic Designs for providing rewards to our Kickstarter donors and helping us spread the word about our program through organic cotton T's; to FedCo and MOFGA for advice and supplies; to Johnny's Seeds and High Mowing Seeds for your donations; to Build-A-Sign and Dan Feller, making beautiful and educational signage accessible in our orchards; and to all of our individual donors who help fund the programs of ReTreeUS!

You can follow the number of trees and school orchards we install by checking out the tree count on the right side of the blog screen. Get ready to see some trees!