Everything's Gone Green

Garden Grown Grapes

The Urbane Forager Project encourages active travel, reduces reliance on commercially transported food, and strengthens environmental stewardship (Mansbridge Community Orchard). It also supports public health: spending time outdoors, connecting with nature, cycling or walking between sites, and engaging with local green spaces all contribute to better mental and physical wellbeing.

Spring Moss, For Fun - Not Eating

By teaching others to identify, harvest, and use urban fruit, the project highlights important scientific concepts including seasonality, biodiversity, ecological cycles, and the environmental impacts of food production and transport.

Wild Garlic

To help people with early tree identification and mapping, I created the free seasonal id cheat sheets, which can be downloaded as pdfs or printed off. The Urbane Forager: Free Seasonal Tree id Sheets.

Seasonal Garden Broccoli and Cavallo Nero

Blossom spotting is one of my favourite ways of locating future fruit; I like it partly because of the joy it brings after the bleak days of Winter, but you need to be quick off the mark. The flowers often do not last long and are soon replaced by the bright green of new foliage. The Plum bloom has already faded and next on the menu will be Apple, Pear and Cherry blossom.

We Pick Hundreds of kgs of Free Apples

Needless to say, other options are available, and yes, there is indeed an app for that. Falling Fruit draws on cutting-edge citizen science collaboration. I contributed early mapping data to FallingFruit.org, a global, crowd-sourced fruit map built by an international team of scientists and developers. This open-access platform now allows anyone to find and contribute geospatial data via smartphone, expanding public engagement with ecological information. The Falling Fruit map/app is currently being re-developed and updated, so we should see some improvements soon.

The Falling Fruit Map/App

In slightly less technical language, you can click a button and locate fruit and nut trees, as well as other edibles, close to your location. You can also discover the condition, abundance and seasonality of the nutritious food sources. The app also makes it simple to photograph, locate and  contribute your own discoveries, for others to find.

Rhubarb

Tangentially, Rhubarb crumble is another of my seasonal favourites, it has been growing strongly in our garden and I've already made (and eaten) two tart and tasty treats. I like to add a small amount of ginger to make it perkier still (as recommended by Delia Smith).

Another Crumble