Abundance Edinburgh

Last Friday we had our long-awaited cider making day.  Well, we didn’t actually make cider there on the spot, but we used our brand new home-made press to make lots of apple juice, some of which will go on to make the Abundance 2010 cider.

The juice making began on Thursday evening when we went on a picking blitz to ensure we had enough apples to make plenty of juice.  In the end, when they were all brought to the event from our various stores, we probably had 500kg of apples!

Needless to say our biggest problem wasn’t a lack of apples, but how to scrat 500kg of apples without a purpose built scratter.  Instead we relied on the power of members of the public, who kindly bashed our apples to a pulp with the aid of a large fencepost.

The day was hugely successful and lots of fun.  After giving away lots of fresh juice, we were left with around 6 gallons, which our resident brewers are now charged with turning into top notch cider.  Watch this space!

Hi folks, we haven’t updated the website in a little while, but we have been busy – out harvesting, and taking part in apple days and eco fests.

Last weekend however we were busy with something else – the making of our much awaited apple press .  Many thanks to Matt of DIY Edinburgh for hosting us again.

Thanks to Jona’s planning and the help of 6 or 7 volunteers we managed to build ourselves an apple press in one afternoon for the princely sum of £9!  Well done to everyone involved.

We did manage to do a quick test run of the press using some hastily foraged apples, and it worked like a dream.  The real test however, will be at our cider making workshop this Friday.  This press is a beast and we are gonna need lots of apples to feed it.

Please come along to the workshop and bring some apples with you. It will be held outside the Informatics Forum between 12-4pm on Friday 29th.  You’ll find us between the car park and the university shop.  More details of this and our forthcoming apple blitz are to follow….

us and our homemade bike trailer

It’s that time again, the apple season is upon us, and soon we will be out harvesting fruit in the gardens and greenspaces of Edinburgh.

We have lots of ideas for fun activities we’d like to do during the harvest, and so we’ll be having a get-together on Monday 6th of August to discuss our plans.  Meet us outside the Forest Hill building on Forest road (down the lane from Sandy Bell’s pub).  Checkout the map for better directions.

This year we hope to collect more fruit, help others start harvests in their part of town, and do lots more juicing. But maybe we need to build a few fruit presses first…..

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!