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.

That’s right: Every date tree that gets pruned is a wasted opportunity … to make money, to even feed some people. Sure, they’re tasty. They’re also a great source of potassium, iron and fiber. Yet they just wind up in the trash.

Read the complete article here.

Also see Arizona State University students pick campus dates here.

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.

Photo by Michael Levenston.

One of our garden neighbours, food writer Eve Johnson, introduced us to this unusual fruit a couple of years ago. In her book “Eating my Words”, she wrote:

“Then, cleaning up a day or two after a medlar tasting, I was shocked to find that one of the medlars left on the serving plate had become tumescent, engorged. The wrinkles were gone. The skin was as smooth as a just-picked medlar, and now it shone again, in some places a dark wine red, in others, a rich purple brown with golden spots. The once recessed seeds had popped out. The pentagram was even more prominent. And the rim of the calyx had begun to leak a sweet, shiny juice.”

“I peeled it. The scent had sharpened. Instead of the muted applesauce smell, it was stronger and sweeter, the taste of apple-flavoured fermentation, but not the taste of a rotten apple. I felt, unmistakably, a little electric thrill.”

See Eve Johnson’s book here.

Also see: Medlar: The Best Fruit You’ve Never Heard Of here.

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.

The thing is, we’re not trying to get permission to just plant trees anywhere. We’re starting with communities who want to plan and care for these trees. We want to know who is going to take care of them, and how it’s going to be structured. We built a framework and work with [community] delegations to give them a planting kit and help them learn how to care for the trees.

Complete story here.

The Boston Tree Party website here.

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.

Some fruits are conventional – apples, for example – and can easily be donated to food banks. Others, such as elderberries, which need to be processed before they are eaten, or flying dragon, a lemon-like citrus fruit with a piney aroma that is harvested by an organization called Concrete Jungle in Atlanta, are tougher to figure out what to do with.

Read the complete article here.

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.

“It is more than just growing more food, or bringing food into the emergency food system,” Neth said.

“There is the component of trying to retell the story of food, to re-create a relationship with food,” he said. “You can’t just give people food boxes and have that sense of abundance really.”

They want a neighbor-to-neighbor network, but also a system that allows backyard growers to make a small profit on excess food they grow. And they want people to embrace the heritage of agriculture in the city.

Read the complete article here.

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.

For both the adults and the children it felt like a big clandestine adventure and all we were doing is picking apples about 10 minutes from our house. Or so it seemed. In actuality we were what the Brits call “scrumping,” or in other words, taking apples from trees we didn’t own—a fast-growing trend in urban London and throughout the U.K.

The trees and locations are spread among the pickers by word of mouth. Last spring, Ms. Cruz picked cherries in a local park. “People looked at me like I was stealing,” said Ms. Cruz, a coordinator for volunteer fruit gatherers. “But we are actually helping the council gather the fruit, which would just rot and go to waste.” The apple-picking area in question is under Hounslow Council, which issued a comment saying “We are more than happy for people to enjoy our trees and their fruit in London’s greenest borough.”

These women are part of a growing army of guerrilla fruit pickers, who climb fences and brave dangers ranging from broken wine bottles and stinging nettles to hostile dogs and turf-conscious rats to pick seasonal fruit in unorthodox places. Scrumping activists even have their own organization called Abundance, which is composed of volunteers throughout the U.K. who are dedicated to harvesting unpicked fruit. In London, Abundance has been set up as an association with charitable aims.

Read the complete article here.

$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.

But Amy Countryman, treasurer of the Bloomington Community Orchard said the money will change all that.

The orchard will contribute to Bloomington’s food security, inspire joyful community engagement, and educate citizens while making sustainability delicious. The City of Bloomington has offered support and a spacious site adjacent to our largest and oldest community garden, Winslow Woods Park, and the YMCA.

See their website here.

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%.

We always talk to home owners before selling fruit from their trees, explaining that the sale of this fruit goes directly to funding the neighborhood fruit harvests next year. We aim to be as transparent as possible and so will again release an annual report early  next year detailing how much we earned from fruit sales and how much it costs to organize our harvests.

See the complete blog post here.

Overview of City Fruit

City-grown fruit is a resource for the entire community. Because most residential tree owners can’t—or don’t—use all the fruit produced on their properties, much of it falls to the ground and rots.In addition, much of the fruit grown in urban landscapes is infested with preventable pests.

City Fruit works neighborhood by neighborhood to help residential tree owners grow healthy fruit, to harvest and use what they can, and to share what they don’t need. City Fruit collaborates with others involved in local food production, climate protection, horticulture, food security and community-building to protect and optimize urban fruit trees.

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.

“This is part of what’s obviously been an explosion in interest in locally grown and organic food,” said Janet Parker, a founding member of a group called Madison Fruits and Nuts. “I think we’re coming to realize more and more that it doesn’t make any sense, at this late date with climate change being what it is, to truck in so much of our food from California, in the cases of apples, sometimes New Zealand.”

Free fruit also is available for picking in season on public land in Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, Minneapolis and New York, according to neighborhoodfruit.com, a site that helps people track down available fruit.

Parker works with other volunteers to add fruit trees to parks in her Wisconsin city, which has a population of 27,700. The group wants to initially plant trees in four parks and awaits city approval.

It seeks funding from a California-based non-profit, the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation, which helps establish fruit trees at parks and schools. Cem Akin, the foundation’s executive director, said fruit trees in parks are not new, but there’s been “recent movement toward getting more trees into city parks, more free nutrition into city parks as well.”

Akin said that in the past year, his group has been inundated with funding requests from cities and counties in California, Nevada, Georgia, Wyoming, Florida, Arizona and Vermont. The group will make funding decisions on these projects this year.

Since 2005, the foundation has provided trees and advice to planting projects in 20 states, Akin said.

“It’s a good way to get the community mobilized. It’s a good way to get everybody to learn about sustainability, about environmental stewardship and about botany,” he said. “Our goal is to strategically donate and plant fruit tree orchards to areas where the harvest most benefits communities.”

Akin said that in some cities, groups glean fruit from urban orchards and donate the produce to food pantries.

Read the rest of the article here.

Visit the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation here.

The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation, We are an international nonprofit organization dedicated to planting fruitful trees and plants to benefit human communities and heal the earth. We locate our orchards where they will benefit communities the most–at public parks, school yards, food banks, homeless shelters, Native American reservations, and communities in the developing world. We work in communities throughout the world to site orchards that serve as community assets, providing fresh food, creating a focal point for community organizing, and benefiting wildlife.

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.

Now council staff are working with two separate organisations to investigate more sites.

Mark Turley, director of the services for communities department, said: “The aim is to provide a range of managed orchard sites for the benefit of local communities. A range of council staff are advising and assisting with back green development, and also with the planting of fruiting species of trees and bushes.”

One of the organisations involved is the Scottish Children’s Orchard, which has piloted a scheme in Glasgow. Over the last three years it has established a network of people interested in developing Edinburgh projects.

Chairman John Hancox said: “We’ve run a lot of workshops explaining the context of what we’re trying to do. We’ve planted school orchards, such as one at Ferryhill Primary School, as well as other orchards for local community groups.

“We’ve also done work with the Botanics, the Edinburgh Mela multicultural festival, an apple day at the Scottish Parliament and planting in Craigmillar.”

“The main aim of the project is to create ‘fruitful cities’, ideally with a fruit tree on every street that children can plant and watch grow. As the children grow the tree grows and they’re able to watch its development, then bring their own children in the years to come and pick fruit from it.

“Part of the agenda is to try to get kids to realise that fruit grows on trees, and that freshly picked fruit always tastes better. It changes their attitude towards fruit and gives them the benefit of the fruit’s nutrition. It’s also about getting people active and having a stake in the local environment.

“I planted a tree in George Square in Glasgow and every time I walk past it I take a great deal of pride in my achievement. I want the people of Edinburgh to have a similar sense of achievement, and to one day walk past a tree they’ve planted and say, ‘I did that’.”

See article here.

See Scottish Children’s Orchard website here.

See Orchards for the 21st century. Scotland’s fruit orchards have largely disappeared, yet John Hancox, Director of the Children’s Orchard, believes orchards will have a new and vital place in our future.

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;

Community Fruit Tree Plantings on the margins of private property and in community gardens; Public Fruit Park proposals in Hollywood, Los Feliz and downtown LA; and Neighborhood Infusions, taking the fruit found on one street and infusing it in alcohol to capture the spirit of the place.

See Fallen Fruit website here.

Fallen Fruit: Another Year in LA and LACE

by Annie Buckley
Art in America,
Oct, 2009

The Los Angeles-based artist collective Fallen Fruit has gained the attention of the art world and local community alike with a fusion of populism, relational esthetics and adolescent antics. The trio–David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young–began mapping fruit trees growing on or extending over public property in Los Angeles in 2004 and making the maps free to the public. They also hold regular events, such as Nocturnal Fruit Forages and Public Fruit Jams (held for the past several years at Machine Project, also in L.A.), offering participants the opportunity to pick fruit under the moonlight or make jam. That activities like making and canning food are traditionally domestic undertakings adds a layer to the collective’s complex, if lighthearted, approach to the blurring of public and private space. Fallen Fruit was recently featured in two concurrent gallery exhibitions. Both venues were faced with the dilemma of presenting fundamentally interactive, participatory art as static objects in a fixed space.

Fallen Fruit Troops

At the artist-run commercial gallery Another Year in LA, Fallen Fruit’s work was available for sale for the first time. Culled from the tools and accessories of Public Fruit Jams, the show was a thought-provoking blend of event souvenirs and DIY art. Each of the items, including cutting boards, knives, jam jars, aprons and bags, is engraved or printed with text plucked from anonymous comments about the collaborative’s videos, which are posted on YouTube. Seemingly chosen for provocation, the quotes range from supportive to mocking to bigoted. For example: “to all ‘haters’ this basically shows that we can live off the land,” “dipshit liberals always looking for a handout” and “wut a fag.” Also on view were color photographs of teens eating fruit, bottles of fruit-infused vodka (drinkable art, available for sale), and a poetic and engaging text piece, Jam Score (2009), that blends three participants’ accounts of a Public Fruit Jam. Crowded, fun and winkingly ironic, the exhibition as a whole encapsulated the collective’s free-spirited inclusiveness.

Fallen Fruit Map

In comparison, the work at LACE, developed during a recent residency in Colombia, is elegant and serious but lacks specificity and vigor. This exhibition is part of the collective’s new, ongoing project, “The Colonial History of Fruit,” which aims to critically examine the very timely issue of fruit’s journey from crop to tabletop. But the show’s lush, large-scale photographs of banana trees and workers–respectively punctuated by shimmering sunlight and bright yellow aprons–come close to resembling advertisements for the corporate policies the exhibition purportedly challenges. Multiple videos feature the artists’ interviews with locals. Although the questions are translated, the responses are not. For Spanish-speaking viewers, the articulate responses stand in sharp contrast to the often vague and meandering questions. One hopes that further iterations of this promising initiative will more effectively integrate the humor and critique for which Fallen Fruit has gained steady acclaim with a more in-depth investigation of the fragile complexities of the global economy.

See article here.

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!

iPhone App Find Fruit

Introducing Find Fruit, your mobile companion of NeighborhoodFruit.com! Locate fruit trees on public land on the go!
Looking for local blackberries for a pie? Want to smell fruit blossoms on a romantic walk? Interested to learn fun facts about common edible plants? Want to find fruit on the go in many metropolitan areas nationwide? Feel like organizing a fruit picking adventure in your neighborhood?

Find Fruit unlocks cities, enabling you to explore in new ways. Instead of being trapped in the concrete jungle, this app is your key to the edible urban forest! Find Fruit helps you find fresh fruit growing down the street and learn more about fruit trees.

Features:

Location of thousands of trees on public land nationwide on a standard Google Map.

Current location or zipcode/address enabled search.

Directions from your current location.

Configurable fruit tree search by seasonality, type of tree, proximity, and number of trees displayed.

Usage, description and factoids for all available fruit types, ranging from the pedestrian Apple, to the exotic Yellow Mangosteen!

Beautiful and informative illustrations to help identify the fruit.

Intuitive and fun interface!

Visit Neighborhood Fruit’s web site here.

And their iPhone app here.

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.

We make juice, cider, jams, preserves and pickles from the damaged and bruised fruit. We leave plenty for the birds and the soil. We carry Abundance through the winter by teaching people how to prune their trees. Abundance taps into a huge public enthusiasm for and appreciation of local produce. We are rediscovering Sheffield as one big orchard.

Abundance was set up by Stephen Watts and Anne-Marie Culhane in 2007. Stephen is a food grower, artist and wild food forager and Anne-Marie is a community and environmental artist working in rural and urban areas. Stephen had been spotting fruit trees across the city over a number of years and harvesting them for his own needs, and together they decided to find a way to share the bounty with others.

The Handbook offers sections on:

Section 1
Our Philosophy – The guiding principles of
Abundance

Section 2
Preparing for Abundance – Scouting and
leafleting, Trees and tree owners

Section 3
Spreading the word, Communicating with
volunteers, Funding

Section 4
The Harvest – Timing, Fruit chart, What time
to harvest, Harvesting gear, Shakers and
catchers, Getting it sorted, Transport

Section 5
Storing, Processing and Distributing – Sorting
the fruits of your labours, Pressing the fruit,
Preserving the fruit, Abundance Week and
Encounter Abundance

Section 6
Mapping and Recording

Section 7
Pruning

Section 8
Planting

Section 9
Pollution

Section 10
Abundance Possibilities

Appendices

References

The whole handbook can be read online and also printed from this web site. Highly recommended!

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.

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.

Ms. Diserens uses sophisticated databases and remote telephone answering systems to track the group’s 700 or so volunteers, 40 receiving organizations, 1,000 fruit-inundated homeowners and, on a recent Tuesday, 780 sticky pounds of French prunes.

“You feel like you’re actually doing something,” Diana Foss, 44, a former astronomer who is now a stay-at-home mother, said as she was sorting plums and prunes recently in Ms. Leone’s backyard. “You pick a piece of fruit and know that someone’s going to eat it.”

Read the complete NYT’s article here.

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.