Abundance Edinburgh

Ever since last years harvest we’ve been talking about how great it would be to be able to transport picked fruit by bicycle trailer. Bike trailers can be surprisingly expensive, so in line with the DIY spirit that abundance thrives on, we have decided to get together and build our own.

Matt, Jake, and Will have offered to host and teach and bike trailer making workshop on Saturday and Sunday the 15th and 16th of May at their workshop in Craigmillar. The workshop will be pitched at the skill level of those taking part, and spaces are limited, so please get in touch to express your interest right away.

The workshop may include anything from assembling a flat-pack bike trailer kit, through to welding your own trailer from whatever scrap metal you can find – it’s up to you. All trailers made as part of the workshop will be looked after by the abundance project, but will also be made available for use by other community groups.

Please email diyedinburgh@riseup.net to reserve your place at the workshop. The workshop will be free, although donations of food, metal, and cold hard cash will be gratefully received.

The uber-cool DIY Edinburgh website can be found here

Greener Leith are planting an orchard on Leith Links, and are looking for local residents who might like to come down and help out.

The orchard will contain more than 100 trees, and 120m of berry hedges. You can find more information about the project and how to attend on their website

Artlink and the Friends of the Orchard are organising a picnic in the orchard of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital to celebrate the arrival of the apple blossom.  Bring some food to share and and instrument if you’re a musical type.  We look forward to seeing you.

It was one week later than planned due to the bad weather, but the pruning workshop was well attended last Thursday. Local gardner Tom Watson taught us the finer arts of fruit tree pruning – how to identify and remove diseased branches, pruning strategies to maximise airflow, and pruning techniques to maximise yield.

Hopefully now we can go home and put our new skills to use pruning those unruly trees in our own back gardens…

Due to the bad weather the tree pruning workshop has been postponed until the 4th of March. Hope to see you there next week!

It’s only a couple of months until Spring is upon us, so now is a good time to do some Winter pruning before the trees put on their new growth.

Lots of our members have expressed an interest in learning to prune unruly fruit trees growing in their own, or in their neighbours garden. A properly pruned tree should stand up better against disease, will be easier to pick from, and will crop more fruit.

This year Artlink, based at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital will be hosting a tree pruning workshop in the orchard within the hospital grounds.  It’s a beautiful place, and we did some picking there last year, so it will be great to return and show some TLC to the trees that provided us with so many apples.  The workshop will run on Thursday 25th of February 4th of March from 10am til 12.

The event is open to all members of the community, and it would be great to RSVP us and them so that we know you’re coming.  Our email is at the bottom of the page.

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.