These bins were totally filled and I still have another load to grab from the community orchard. I had to pick the ones that were weighing down branches without the potential for growing well. They're not ripe yet but are usable and I didn't want to dump any I could save. I also have like 50kg of semi-ripe plums to pickle and turn into wine. The apple butter will go with some homemade bread.
So satisfying to grow and process/cook your own food from scratch. Feels magical
Goals. When I can afford a bit of land I'm determined to have a hobby farm where the surplus goes to an org like PSL to do a People's Free Food Programme like the Black Panthers did. An orchard like this where we've taken park land and made a free-forage area that donates to the municipal food bank is a close second I'd love to professionally integrate into more parks.
Ohhhh yeah! Both of those ideas are awesome. More edible parks and things would be so nice! Just gotta get a lot of people on board for upkeep
There's this group in my town that does food rescue from a bunch of grocers and they started this free grocery, where people can go and "shop" instead of getting a pre packaged food box. You sign up for a time and get access to a bunch of organic produce, bread, sweets, they have all kinds of perishables both vegan and non too. From what I remember one dream was to be able to rent a space and open a kind of community kitchen where they could do free cooking classes and stuff; I hope they are able to do it one day
Upkeep is definitely the barrier for us planting more. Ideally I'd love to turn every park into some combination of pollinator habitat, wildlife sanctuary, community gardens/food forests, and interpretive/demonstration spaces. It takes a full-time crew of 5 horticulturists to cover what we have though and volunteers are really hit-or-miss for complex plant work. Eventually I'm using that example in some Marxist green urbanist theory once I have a handle on how the economics and public relations side work.
i have an apple tree in the backyard that does a great job being a meeting spot for earwigs and for dumping apples all over the yard. I sprayed the crop with neem oil and it helped with some of the fruits but most still have borer holes in them
So many earwigs. I had them falling on me all day. The borer holes were a big target today and are what separated my livestock bin from the human one. We don't spray the trees so maybe 30% of the apples had bore holes even a couple months before harvest.
damn, that's nice, I love when ppl give stuff to sanctuaries. What animals? I visited a pig sanctuary last year and they were so lovely
I gave the first load to a city-run educational farm. They have surrendered cows, goats, horses, and a few other animals with a focus on early childhood education. For the next load I'm waiting to hear back from one of two private livestock sanctuaries with similar animals. One is run by vegans and the other seems to have some connection to the Lakota tribal nation and a focus on horses.
How do you pickle the plums? I just put mine in a jars with a mix of salt vinegar and back tea, in different proportions. But they became way too soft. (Prune season was about a month ago over here)
I've never tried (or even eaten them). We just ended up with so many and with the pits I didn't want to try to use them for livestock. Searching for uses I found the pickled plums and a plum wine I really liked in Japan, so it's going to be an experiment with both. The trees are still so full of plums that they're sagging to the ground and we have another month to go before they're ripe.
Thanks for the reply, this is also the first year I do this, I have half a dozen trees, and other years they barley had any fruit. But this year they were quite productive so I made a few jars. Since you seem to have a lot of fruit, I hope you can experiment liberally and make good pickled plums and wine.
