Last week we were lucky enough to have a couple of opportunities for our volunteers to pick pears. Here are some photos, and thoughts, from one of those picks, shared by volunteers Ariel and Maria.
“Had a great time on a beautiful warm fall day picking pears in St. Vital! Lots of helpers made for quick results! Only 1 hour and almost 200 lbs were collected. What a harvest! Thank you Fruit Share and everyone who contributed!” -Maria, Volunteer
| Apple Curry Soup |
Sauté onion in 1tbsp of butter until soft.
| Sauté onions. |
| Add apples, stock and seasoning. |
| Strain mixture through food mill. |
Dear Crab Apple Owners,
We want to thank you all for registering your fruit with us over the years, we are glad that you have the desire to share your fruit and wish to see it put to good use.
As most of you are already aware, this summer we have had some challenges filling all of our pick requests. This has been especially true for Crab Apples. There are a few reasons for this, which we’d like to share with you in the hopes of coming up with some solutions to the ‘crab apple dilemma’ for next year.
We need a little help from you to find a solution to this dilemma for next year. Please keep a close eye on your trees, and contact us to request a harvest at least one week before your apples are actually ready for picking. In the time leading up to the pick, check on your apples by picking a few, cutting them open, and making sure they aren’t rotting on the inside. If you find your apples are past their prime, please contact us to cancel your pick request. It is not fair to our volunteers to ask them to pick rotten apples that no one can enjoy. If you aren’t sure if your apples are large enough to be enjoyed, please give us a call or send us a picture before signing up.
In return, we commit to recruiting more volunteers to handle the amount of requests we get at peak times, and to finding new ways to inspire our volunteers and partner organizations to pick and use more crab apples. We have begun this process by running workshops with our partner organizations but are always looking for more ways to do it. To that end, if you have any great ideas to get volunteers excited about crab apples, we welcome you to share them with us!
Thank you again for thinking of Fruit Share, and for your intention to share your surplus fruit. We look forward to working with you again next year.
Sincerely,
Anna and the Fruit Share Team
The provincial government is looking at potentially banning the sale and use of chemicals to maintain the appearance of lawns and gardens and one of our Fruit Share volunteers has been involved in gathering support for such a ban. Because we know many of our volunteers and homeowners feel the same way, we wanted to share some more information with you on the subject. Here is some background information on the ban:
Pesticides are seriously harmful to our heath, to our children, to our pets, and to our environment. There are many natural and safe alternatives for dealing with weeds in lawns and gardens.
Cosmetic Pesticide Ban Manitoba supports legislation that:
Cosmetic pesticide use is a public health Issue, particularly for children
The provincial Play It Safe document outlines why a cosmetic pesticide ban is being considered. Go to this website before October 1, 2012 to share your opinion: http://www.gov.mb.ca//conservation/envprograms/feedback.html.
The Cosmetic Pesticide Ban Manitoba group is asking you to let the government know if you support a cosmetic pesticide ban in Manitoba. They need to hear from as many people as possible. There is a strong lobby from the industry against the proposed legislation. To express your support of the ban, visit the group’s website, like and share the cosmetic pesticide ban Facebook page, and sign the petition.
Filed Under : Fruit Share by FS Coordinator
Sep.17,2012Fruit Share will be at the Wolseley Farmers’ market for one final evening tomorrow, Tuesday the 18th, from 4-8 pm. We’ll have a table selling the last of our cider (only 12 jugs left!), the Prairie Fruit Cookbook, apples and hopefully some baking and preserves donated by our volunteers.
From 5-7 pm, our volunteer Darby will demonstrating how fun and easy it is to make your own apple cider with a homemade press. If you’re interested, you can order a press to be made for you for $75, or talk to Darby about how you can make your own.
We’ve got a few grape picks coming up this week, so for all you grape pickers out there, here are a few pointers to ensure a quick and satisfying harvest!
It is best to pick grapes on a warm, sunny day as the grapes will have the highest sugar content and will store better without any surface moisture.
To pick:
Hold a cluster of grapes in one hand and snip the whole cluster off the vine with sharp garden pruners or scissors. Breaking off the cluster is difficult and will damage the plant, so make sure you are being careful!
How will you use the grapes you pick?
Having trouble determining when your grapes are ready to be picked? Consider these things when looking for the perfect time to harvest!
The ideal grape is sweet, plump, and firm with a deep, full colour. Grapes need a long, warm, sunny growing period to obtain their optimum taste and texture. For prairie grape growers that often means keeping one eye on the grapes and one eye on the forecast throughout September.
Once picked, grapes will not change in sweetness or colour so it’s important to harvest when they are at their peak. The colour of the fruit will turn before the sweetness has fully developed so tasting grapes is the best method to determine when to harvest the fruit. Contrary to popular belief, you do not need to wait until the first frost to harvest your grapes.
Filed Under : Manitoba Fruit by FS Coordinator Sep.13,2012If you’ve sworn off of crab apples based on some bad experiences – please give this post a read. Not all crab apples are alike! Different varieties have different features that make them great for different purposes.
There are many varieties of crab apples available on the prairies and the list of available varieties changes from year to year, with new introductions continually being added. They are often used for landscaping purposes because of their beautiful blossoms and colorful foliage.
The different varieties ripen at different times. Earlier in the season, most of our requests to pick were for the Rescue variety of crab apples, great for fresh eating, juice or jelly.
Rescues are best picked when they are slightly under-ripe, as they can be mushy when fully ripe. They do not store well, and need to be used right away. Unfortunately, this led to a lot of our volunteers having negative crab apple experiences this summer. Because it takes at least a week for us to schedule a harvest after a fruit owner places a request, by the time volunteers arrived to pick the fruit was often mushy, wasp ridden and no good. These experiences tend to turn volunteers off of picking crab apples in general. Fruit owners, this is a great reason to get to know your fruit better! If you can request a harvest a little earlier, knowing that your fruit will turn from edible to inedible quite quickly, than it is more likely we can get volunteers out to pick it while it is still in its prime.
These days though, our crab apple harvest requests are mostly for the Dolgo variety of crabs.
Ripe Dolgo crabs on the tree
All you Jelly makers out there take note! Dolgo crab apples are 3-4 cm in size, and are a beautiful bright red colour. This gives them the reputation of being the best variety of crabs for making jelly, giving great flavor and colour.
Later this month, we may see some requests to harvest the Kerr variety of crab apples. These late season crabs are great for eating fresh, making juice or other processing, and if stored properly, can last for up to 27 weeks!
Some of the other varieties that grow on the prairies are:
Looking for updates on how the summer has been at Fruit Share, or wondering what’s coming up for the fall? Check out our brand new Newsletter for the latest!
Filed Under : Fruit Share by FS Coordinator Sep.11,2012Local music +local food & drink = lovely evening.
If that sounds about right to you, head down to the Exchange Community Church to enjoy the musical stylings of local band Collage-à-trois, a trio of women with amazing voices and beautiful harmonies. Fruit Share will be there, selling our apple cider for the show-goers to enjoy as well as some local farmers selling produce and baked goodies. Show starts at 8 PM.
Filed Under : Uncategorized by FS Coordinator Sep.5,2012Over the long weekend, our website’s host server was compromised. This explains why some folks had difficulty viewing and using our website over the weekend. As a result of this, our site had to be reset to the time of it’s last back up, which was August 27, 2012. What this means is that if you registered your fruit, registered as a volunteer, or requested a harvest last week (between August 28 and September 3), all of that data has been lost and we’ll need you to re-register and/or re-request. If you’re unsure of when you registered or requested, please contact us and we can tell you if you are still in our database. We are very sorry about this, and are working on ways to ensure our data is better protected so that this won’t happen again.
Filed Under : Food Charities by FS Coordinator Sep.4,2012We’ve recently added a whole bunch of new charitable organizations and other community groups to our list of places that would love to receive excess fruit. Here is an updated list, with addresses, for a quick reference. Just click on the name of the charity to go to find out more information about what they do and how you can donate.
Yet another organization doing great work that would be happy to receive donations of excess fruit.
North Point Douglas Women’s Centre
North Point Douglas Women’s Centre exists to create opportunities for women to develop their potential and engage fully as citizens of their community. Their vision is a safe, healthy, vibrant community for women and families in which all forms of violence against women are addressed by engaging the community in prevention and care.
Donated fruit would be eaten fresh and used for programming in their community kitchen or cooking programs or given out to women as emergency food.
Contact Information
Street Address
221 Austin Street.
Phone:
(204)947-0321
E-mail:
Website:
www.northpointdouglaswomenscentre.org
Donations Accepted
Fruit
Rhubarb, Sour cherries (eg. nanking or evans cherries), Crab apples, Big eating/baking apples, Grapes, Berries (eg. strawberries or raspberries), Apricots or Plums
Other Food Items
Canned Fruit Preserves (eg. jam, jelly, sauce, juice, etc.), Frozen Fruit, Home baked products (eg. fruit crisp, pies, breads, etc.). Dates and labels would be nice. Also, garden vegetables would be much appreciated.
Non-Food Items
Just about anything
Donation Logistics
When
Office hours are Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm, closed from 12pm to 1pm for lunch. Open Saturdays 1pm to 4pm.
Where
Drop off at 221 Austin Street, there is no buzzer so just walk inside and staff will help if needed.
On September 18th, Food Matters Manitoba is hosting a Gallery Exhibit AGM at the Winnipeg Art Gallery and they have asked us to be a part of it! In order to showcase the amazing work going on in the food security field in the province, the AGM will feature a photo exhibit capturing the work that we and their other partner organizations do. We’ve been invited to submit and image that demonstrates how Fruit Share has been involved in increasing Food Security for all Manitobans.
So, we are opening it up to you – our volunteers and homeowners – who better to capture what we do? Please send us your best shots of picks or other Fruit Share events. We want to show that Fruit Share is about building community, as well as rescuing fruit, so keep that in mind as you select your submission.
Please send your submissions to [email protected] with PHOTO CONTEST in the subject line. Deadline for submissions is Friday, September 7. Winner will be announce on Monday, September 10, and will receive a free copy of The Prairie Fruit Cookbook, by Getty Stewart.
For more information about the Food Matters AGM, see the poster below.
Here’s another fun way to use Manitoba apples!
Good old fashioned bobbing for apples.
Of course if you’re not keen on the idea of several individuals dipping their mouth in the same water as others, you can modify this activity. At home, I let my kids acutally bob for the apples. At the South Osborne Sidewalk Festival a couple of weeks ago, Fruit Share opted for a modified version that did not involve submersing your head in water.
Option 1 – give the bobber chop sticks and see if they can balance the apple and get it out of the water
Option 2 – give the bobber one chop stick that is dull on both ends and get the participant to stab the apple and pull it out of the water
And, while you’re at it, start a relay race – apple on a spoon. Place a big apple on a small spoon and run laps around the yard making sure the apple stays on the spoon the whole time.
Have fun!
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