There's something remarkably refreshing about an orchard growing in the middle of a city. Not a garden with raised beds. An orchard. Fruit trees planted in neighborhoods where fresh food has never been easy to come by, tended by the people who live there, and giving back season after season for decades.
That's what The Giving Grove does. And they've been doing it in a big way.
With more than 680 orchards growing across cities like Detroit, Nashville, Denver, Pittsburgh, and Seattle, The Giving Grove has built something that looks like a lot of little things but is actually one very large thing: a nationwide network of sustainable, community-rooted food sources in neighborhoods that need them most. Together, these orchards have the potential to produce over 4 million servings of free, fresh food every single year.
Free. Organically grown. Available to the people who live right there.
Behind every orchard, there's a lot of unglamorous, practical work happening, though.
Hanging tree identification signs. Bundling supplies at planting events. Labeling harvested fruit. Managing the details that make it possible for dozens or hundreds of orchards to run well and stay organized across an entire national network.
And for years, a lot of that practical work involved plastic zip ties. Simple, cheap, go-to solution used in multiple ways. And the kind of thing nobody thinks twice about. Until you start thinking about scale. 680 orchards. Many trees each. Many seasons. Many zip ties.
When Atlantic Packaging and A New Earth Project introduced The Giving Grove to FibreStrap, the team was immediately open to it because it aligned with their values. Sustainability isn't just the headline work—the tree plantings and the harvest days. It's also the thousand small choices that support it all.
FibreStrap is a paper-based cable tie made from long fibers sourced from Scandinavian forests. It's strong enough to handle real-world orchard tasks. It's self-locking. It's reusable under the right conditions. And when it's done, it recycles with paper rather than heading to landfill.
The Giving Grove didn't hype this shift. They just named it clearly for what it was: a small change, and that's exactly why it matters.
Because sustainability isn't one big moment. It's the accumulation of honest choices made across every layer of the work. It's planting trees AND choosing what you use to hang the signs on them. It's thinking about the harvest AND thinking about what you bundle it with. It's caring for the fruit AND caring for the soil AND water AND reducing the little bit of plastic that would otherwise end up somewhere it shouldn't.
That's a whole-system perspective. And it takes discipline to hold onto it when most of the world is still rewarding the headline move over the quiet one.
The Giving Grove holds onto it. That's part of why this partnership makes sense.
FibreStrap is available through A New Earth Project and Atlantic Packaging. If you're doing orchard work, community food stewardship, urban farming, or any kind of work where plastic zip ties have just always been the default, we'd love to talk with you about making the switch.
Learn more at anewearthproject.com/products/fibrestrap and follow The Giving Grove's work at givinggrove.org and on Instagram at @givinggrove.