Abundance Edinburgh

It’s now 6 months since we started harvesting, but even now we still have lots of apples in our storage.  As the harvest work is now done, we’ve turned our focus to distributing the fruit we have collected.

One of the major aims of the Abundance project is to get the food we harvest to people who need it and who will use it, and so recently we’ve been in touch with the Cyrenians, who run the Good Food program – part the nationwide FareShare scheme.  The Cyrenians are more than happy to collect our fruit and distribute it to 40 of the homelessness projects they serve – which is great news for us – it’s good to know that the work that we did earlier in the year is somehow helping others.

This afternoon the Cyrenians came round to pick up the remainder of our apples.  Surprisingly without any high-tech storage technology our cooking apples have kept well into 2010.  So thanks go to the Cyrenians, and also to our volunteers who did all the harvesting – let’s hope some folk enjoy all those apples!

We’ve spent lots of time this autumn collecting apples and distributing them at apple days, but we haven’t really had the opportunity to get many of them to local shops.  So as the nights are getting shorter we’re spending a bit of time packing apples and pears from our store into boxes ready for distribution.

We’re also talking to the Cyrenians Good Food program with a view to giving them some of our fruit to be distributed to some of the 50+ homeless shelters they work with.  That’s a fantastic result when you think that without our efforts most of these apples would have gone to landfill rather than people’s bellies.  Well done everyone!

We’ve made apple juice, apple jelly, apple pie, apple crumble, apple cheese, apple rings, and apple wine.  There isn’t much we haven’t tried…. but we still have plenty of apples.  So what to do with the surplus?

The reduced leather

Last weekend we had a go at one of the few recipes we hadn’t yet tried – apple leather.  No, it’s not for making shoes, it’s for eating.  The best bit about this recipe is that it doesn’t need any extra ingredients, you can make it with apples that at the end of their lifespan, and it’s even popular with the kids.

All you need to do is chop and slowly puree apples on a low heat before seiving out the pips.  Put the remainder in a shallow baking tray and leave it in an open oven on a low heat, or even on top of a warm boiler.  I tried one in an aga, and the other on top of the boiler.  Both experiments worked quite well, leaving us with something resembling an old fashioned Wham! bar after 24-48 hours.  When it’s ready you can just peel it out of the tray and chop it into bite sized pieces.

It looks like the Guardian are now catching on to the Abundance idea.  Following Abundance Sheffield’s appearance on River Cottage the Guardian have a short piece on the Sheffield group.

If you’ve come after seeing their article welcome!  Please do send us an email (address at the bottom), and join our mailing list if you’d like to keep informed of what is going on.

ciderfest - the beginnings

By this point of the year we’ve experimented with just about every possible recipe for apples.  We’ve made apple jam, apple pie, apple chutney, apple crumble, apple juice, apple cheese – the one thing we have done yet is to ferment them (at least not deliberately).

The big advantage of fermented foods is that they will keep for much longer than the raw fruit itself – so you can be drinking your cider next summer while you wait for the apples to arrive.  Once the juice has been fermented to alcohol you can also make your own cider vinegar, and homemade vinegar is fantastic for cooking with in the kitchen.

pressing and pulping

We did have grand plans for the weekend to make all sorts of apple pies, leathers, and crisps, but in the end pulping and pressing the apples to make cider was enough to keep us all busy.  Memo to self : buy a bigger press next year!

That said it was a lot of fun to press the fruit, and with a few folk round to help out, the afternoon passed quite quickly.  When our chain gang tired we we rewarded them with a break for apples, cheese, chutney, and last years apple wine – the perfect accompaniment to a day of cider making.

Amy and Russell chopping

As we speak we now have 4 gallons of juice fermenting away in a secret location.  Suprisingly only one of those is cider – this was due to the relative scarcity of eating apples in our stores – the few cooking apples we did add was beginning to make the juice quite acidic.  The other 3 will hopefully go on to create perry – 2 gallons of conference pears (they’re very juicy), and 1 gallon of what I think might be Doyenne du Comice (a fantastic pear, but these were windfalls).

Tawny spraying juice on the walls

Only now that we have started the fermentation did I bother to read some instructions for how to make cider and perry.  I can report that we have failed to obey most of the rules – but hey, isn’t that most of the fun?  I’ll keep this blog updated with the progress of our juice, and fingers crossed we might have something to drink next year when we do this on an even BIGGER scale

Thea picking pears

So far this autumn we’ve harvested lots and lots of apples, but only small quantities of pears.  The pears we have harvested so far have mostly been rock hard, and rather than ripening off the tree most of them have tended to go rubbery.  However, this week we paid a visit to a garden on Fountainhall road which had three pear trees with perfectly ripe pears ready to fall from the tree.  The pears were so ripe in fact that just picking one would cause many others on the same branch to fall.

Alongside the three pear trees there were quite a few apple trees but unfortunately we never had the time to collect all of the surplus – after harvesting the pears of just two trees the rain came in and we had to call it a day.  Even though the rain stopped play, the fruit we had picked was enough to fill the boot and back seat of a car, so it looks like we will have to make arrangements to return!

The stores are beginning to fill up, so it may be time for us to have a distribution day. Please contact us if you have ideas for where our fruit should go.

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still.
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples; I am drowsing off.
I cannot shake the shimmer from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the water-trough,
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.

But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and reappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
And I keep hearing from the cellar-bin
That rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking; I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall,
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised, or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.

One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep

After apple picking – by Robert Frost

The last day of our busy weekend was spent at the Edinburgh Royal Botanic gardens, taking part in the apple day.  The Celebration of Scottish apples was hosted in the fabulous new John Hope gateway visitor centre, and was attended by the Commonwealth orchard, John Butterworth, Cuddybridge apple juice, and the Royal Caledonian Horticultural society.

The event was hugely popular with the public, with hundreds of people streaming through the doors all of Saturday to taste Scottish apple varieties, sample freshly pressed juice, and have their fruit identified by the resident expert John Butterworth.

Lots of folk went away impressed by the diversity and flavour of Scottish apples, and a few lucky folk were able to identify old trees that had been growing in their gardens for hundreds(!) of years.

After filling up our stores with apples in the last two days, today was a day for juicing and giving them out at our local apple day.  The event, hosted and organised by Bridgend allotment community health project was a great day – small enough to feel friendly, but packed with lots of fun events and crafty things.

On top of scratting and juicing hundreds of apples, volunteers had the opportunity to try some fantastic home made pies, bake in the cob oven, and throw bashed apples at the local rodent.

We set up our stall to display our recently collected apples and a collage of fruit from our apple identification chart.  There were other groups present too – bespoke organics events had a great catering stall with some delicious vegan chocolate cake, as well produce from other local groups such as Redhall walled garden, the Engine shed, and the chocolate tree.

Over at the barbeque there were beef burgers from Whitmuir organics, and in the allotments a local storyteller told us a story about the one-eyed lady of Skye.

All in all it was a great day, and the sun shone on us too.  Well done Bridgend for hosting a great event, and heres to the next one!

kristina struggles with a giant Newton Wonder

With a busy weekend of apple days ahead of us we arranged another picking at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital Orchard.  It is difficult to for us to find an opportunity to get large numbers of people together to pick apples, so we thought picking in the orchard rather than a private garden might be a chance to do just that.

So we headed along to the orchard after work, and had some fun climbing the trees to shake some apples down.  In the end we only harvested from two trees, but we still came away with just about as much apples as our volunteers could handle.  We were also joined by a couple of folk from the Re-union project who were gathering apples for a future apple day with one of the schools bordering the union canal.

Although it had been a beautiful autumn day, the nights are fair drawin’ in, and by 7pm there was a chill in the air.  It feels as if winter is just around the corner, so we better make the most of the daylight hours after work and get picking!