Category — Fruit

You’ll see this all over Phoenix in the late summer. Photo by Balaram Mahalder.

What’s Up With Wasted Dates?

By Justin Schmid
WanderingJustin.com
Nov 18th, 2011

Excerpt:

The Phoenix area is full of big, beautiful, bountiful date trees. Come the end of summer, they begin to hang heavy with fruit. Before it ripens, though, landscaping crews scurry about. They cut the branches down and toss pounds upon pounds of growing dates into the trash. At grocery stores and farmers markets, these same dates sell for up to $10 a pound.

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Mespilus germanica features an unusual apple-like fruit that requires bletting to eat; although not widely eaten today, consumption of these fruits was much more common in the past.

Mike: I am able to remember the tree’s name by calling it ‘Blet Medlar’ after the comic actress Bette Midler.

Today we met two people, born in Northern Iran, who were picking the fruit of a Medlar tree planted along a residential street in Vancouver. They loved this fruit, but hadn’t tasted it since leaving Iran 26 years ago.

The couple said that after taking the fruit home, they would let them ripen (blet) under a cloth on a tray in a warm place for a couple of weeks before eating. Finding these fruit brought memories back and tears to their eyes.

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The New Agtivist: Lisa Gross is covering the city with fruit trees

By Lily Mihalik
Grist
Sept 6, 2011

Excerpt:

Our motto is civic fruit, and we call for the planting of fruit trees in civic space. So we really see these trees — which are planted by communities on land that they are somehow connected to or control — as a focal point for community engagement.

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Volunteer Kristine Zylstra-Moore with Fruit Share picks crab apples at the residence of Mike and Christine Smith in Winnipeg, July 27, 2011. The Winnipeg harvest organization launched last year with 10 volunteers and 20 picking locations in one neighbourhood; this year, 125 volunteers have already signed on, as have 50 locations. Photo by John Woods/The Globe and Mail.

An international movement to make use of urban-grown fruit that is normally left to rot has burst into full bloom.

By Jessica Leeder
Globe and Mail
Jul. 29, 2011

Excerpt:

In Toronto, nearly 20,000 pounds of fruit was harvested last year, each haul divided among volunteers, homeowners and community partners, including shelters and food banks. But figuring out what to do with the abundance, much of which accumulates during a couple of short months, is an ongoing preoccupation every harvest organizations faces.

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4000 seed balls were rolled in two hours along this production line at Urban Abundance.

Urban Abundance

By Dean Baker
The Oregonian
November 05, 2010

Excerpt:

They kick-started their program this fall by creating a computerized database of fruit and nut trees in the city.

From trees at the 20 sites that registered on their website, Urban Abundance volunteers harvested 1,500 pounds of prunes and apples that might otherwise have been wasted, and donated them to One Life Food Pantry in Vancouver.

But, Neth said, that was just a start for the program.

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Children during an urban harvest in London this year. Photo by Karen Liebreich, Abundance London.

Growing army of guerrilla fruit pickers

By Sara Calian
Wall Street Journal
Oct. 29, 2010

Excerpt:

My friend Sarah Cruz called me at 9 a.m. on a recent Saturday and said, “We found a hidden orchard on an abandoned property, can you grab my apple-picking poles at my house in your car and I’ll meet you there on my bike at noon.” I put my 3-year-old and 5-year-old daughters in the car, called my husband and told him to collect my 7-year-old son after football practice and bike to the apple-picking spot in a leafy part of West London. It was impossible to see the hidden orchard from the road, so Karen Liebreich, Ms. Cruz’s picking partner, scrambled from the abandoned plot of bramble and rubble in her long, rubber boots to guide us to the five trees bursting with ripe Bramley eating and cooking apples.

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$20,000 From Tom’s of Maine

By Bertrand Teo
Indiana Economic Digest
Herald-Times
Sept. 26, 2010

A $20,000 gift will help turn Bloomington’s budding community orchard into a “dream,” organizers say.

Right now heaps of compost and diggings greet visitors at the site of the orchard situated across South Highland Avenue from the Winslow Sports Park. An unfinished gravel walkway has been laid out, and orange spray paint and other markings delineating a orchard layout.

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Sustaining an Urban Fruit Gleaning Program. Photo by City Fruit.

So far this year, we’ve harvested 5,775 lbs. of fruit

By James
City Fruit
August 31, 2010

Excerpt:

One of the main reasons we started City Fruit was to develop ways  to become more financially sustainable, rather than depend on an ever-shrinking pool of grant money for funding.

As part of that, we’re experimenting with selling a small portion of the fruit we harvest – with a goal of selling no more than 20% of the usable fruit we harvest. So far this year, we’ve harvested 5,775 lbs. of fruit and have sold 448 lbs., so about 8%.

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Barbara Feeney and Frank Iltis plant a fruit tree at Jessica Bullen Orchard and Quiet Garden in Madison, Wis. Photo by Steve Apps.

Fruit Tree Planting Foundation has provided trees and advice to planting projects in 20 states

By Ben Jones,
USA Today
3/8/2010

Excerpt:

Last fall, Eric Alperin, a San Francisco artist, heard about blackberries, plums and loquats growing on public property in his city and free for the picking.

Armed with bags and a pole device for picking fruit from tall branches, Alperin and his wife went foraging.

“It was great,” he said. “We picked as much as we could carry and had beautiful, fresh, free city fruit,” Alperin said. “I’ll definitely go (picking) again.” Fruit-picking opportunities like that are becoming more common, as volunteers in cities including Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia and Madison, Wis., mobilize behind a goal of planting fruit trees on public land in city parks and neighborhoods.

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Commonwealth Orchards Project- Glasgow. Photo by Local Action on Food

Urban orchards plan starting to bear fruit

By MARK McLAUGHLIN and MICHAEL BLACKLEY
Edinburgh News
01 March 2010

It has planted the seed of an idea which has the potential to blossom across Edinburgh.

The unlikely creation of a fruit orchard in one of the most deprived areas of the city is set to be followed by projects city-wide.

The city council-backed initiative could see school grounds, parks, allotments and even back greens used for growing fruit

The Evening News told last year how a community initiative had led to an orchard with apple, pear, plum and cherry trees being created in Wester Hailes.

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2nd Annual Fruit Tree Adoption- February 6th and 7th

Using fruit as our lens, Fallen Fruit investigates urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community. From protests to proposals for new urban green spaces, we aim to reconfigure the relation between those who have resources and those who do not, to examine the nature of & in the city, and to investigate new, shared forms of land use and property. Fallen Fruit is an art collaboration that began with creating maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles.

Over time our interests have expanded from mapping public fruit to include Public Fruit Jams in which we invite the citizens to bring homegrown or public fruit and join in communal jam-making; Nocturnal Fruit Forages, nighttime neighborhood fruit tours;

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Neighborhood Fruit helps people find and share fruit locally, both backyard bounty and abundance on public lands – 10,000 trees nationwide and counting!

Neighborhood Fruit was created to make use of the abundant fruit growing in our urban environments. Currently, the bulk of fruit grown in backyards and in our cities goes to waste, while the fruit we consume is grown in water-intensive orchards far from our homes. We envision a different future, where the bulk of backyard fruit is utilized and shared between neighbors and our diets replete with home-made goodies. Join us in creating a future where the food we eat is truly fresh, seasonal and local!

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Illustration by Monika Mitkute

The Abundance Handbook – A guide to Urban Fruit Harvesting (Learning from our experiences of harvesting in Sheffield, England)

The Abundance Handbook
Published by Grow Sheffield, 2009
Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England

Abundance harvests trees across the city on industrial waste sites, roadsides, the grounds of mansions and back yards. We harvest a range of soft fruit, top fruit and nuts. Over fifty volunteers of all ages and from many different backgrounds harvest and process the fruit. Fruit is distributed to Surestarts, community groups, community cafes and individuals across Sheffield.

We receive tip-offs by word of mouth, text and email as to where to find ripe fruit trees. The greatest journey any fruit travels from tree to mouth is five miles often by bike and trailer. We have found at least fifty varieties of apples and more than twenty varieties of pears. We give away hundreds of fruits and lots of freshly pressed juice. Tree owners are offered the first share of fresh fruit.

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Click through on the YouTube icon to go to higher quality video.

Strawberry, Raspberry, Blackcurrant, Gooseberry, Tayberry, Saskatoon berry

Maria takes us on a tasting tour at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden. It’s the end of June and we love sampling what we grow.

Photo: Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Food Banks Finding Aid in Bounty of Backyard

By Patricia Leigh Brown, New York Times
September 13, 2008

Thus was born North Berkeley Harvest, part of a small but expanding movement of backyard urban gleaners — they might be called fruit philanthropists — who voluntarily harvest surplus fruit and then donate it to food banks, centers for the elderly and other nonprofit organizations.

The concept of gleaning, or collecting a portion of crops on farmers’ fields for the needy, before or after harvesting, goes back to ancient cultures. But it has more recently been taken up by people like Joni Diserens, a 43-year-old program manager for Hewlett-Packard and founder of Village Harvest in Silicon Valley.

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Once a year we get to taste the exotic Saskatoon Berry, which is mainly grown in the Prairies. The Saskatoon Berries have a wilder flavour than Blueberries and we have to be quick to harvest them before the birds. Julia shows us the right way to pick them – have a bowl of ice cream with you at the bush.