Blossom Sequence Mnemonic Competition

Now, there's a post title I didn't imagine ever writing, but you will be pleased to hear that there is a good reason for it. When Spring arrives, we always use blossom in the trees to help us easily locate and identify fruit trees. We then check back later to look for signs of maturing fruit.

To help remember the sequence that fruit trees bloom in we designed an acronym PBCAP (Plum, Blackthorn, Cherry, Apple, and Pear) Plum normally flowers around March (I have seen Plum blossom in January this year), the others follow in quick succession. The fruit of the Blackthorn is the Sloe so the B could be replaced with an S.

We remember this by using a mnemonic Perceived Blossom Calculates Abundant Produce but this is unwieldy. If you can think of a better one, send it in or write your comments below, the composer of the best will be duly announced and the lucky winner will receive a free copy of our beautiful book, the Urbane Forager: Fruit and Nuts for Free.

As a footnote I will remind readers that a mnemonic does not need to have anything to do with the subject matter, it only needs to be memorable. Richard Of York Fought Battle In Vain is a popular example for recalling colours of the rainbow or Naughty Elephants Spray Water for children learning the compass. So we could have Panthers Black Creep And Pounce or whatever

Exciting Events

We are organising a free community walk with Clare Diaper.

The last walk we did was a huge success, so please share this info to help promote the event.

We meet at 1:30 pm Sun 29th November, at the St Denys train station (Car park of Great South Western pub).

We will walk through St Denys and over Cobden bridge into Riverside Park with the potential to carry on along the Itchen river to Mansbridge, depending on the available light.

I will be pointing out lots of fruit trees that I know in this area including Cherry, Apple, Plum, Crab Apple, Pear and even Mistletoe in my guise as the Urbane Forager.

Clare will be talking about climate change and the potential for river levels to rise as a result. The walk is free and anyone can come but it may involve some rough terrain, so people should dress appropriately and be responsible for their own safety.

If anyone would like to purchase copies of the Urbane Forager book on the day, please notify me in advance through here or on alan@wingchun.org.uk and I will bring some along.

Please put this date in your diary and come along to discover some exciting new things about our lovely city.

Another interesting event is the, Goswell and Milne Midwinter Pop Up Supper Club. This takes place on 5th Dec 7:30 pm at the Art House Cafe. Tickets for this event can be obtained here.

The best Urbane Forager images are now on Pinterest. Please follow us there too & spread the word.

Organic Fruit & Nuts For Free

Regular readers of this blog will know by now that we pick a colossal amount of Apples (as well as other fruit and nuts) from public ground around the city and all of it is available for free, but only for those willing to seek it out and collect it.

You might be tempted to think that because we harvest so much, there will be none left for everyone else who is interested, but nothing could be further from the truth. There is still a great quantity of fruit out there, waiting to be picked.

With this in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to show just some of the trees that we have not picked any fruit from. They are ripe and waiting to be harvested, or ready to drop on the ground and be heartily consumed by Mother Nature (which is also good). In these times of enforced austerity, where we are constantly bombarded with news of food poverty and food banks, I have been known to make bold proclamations about the democratisation of food.

Mostly what we do is explore our environment and then pick free fresh fruit and nuts because they are available and to prevent it being wasted. It is nice to be outdoors and we do have a great deal of free fun. However, despite the huge amounts that we pick, there is still far, far too much for us. This is why we want to engage and inspire other people, to do similar things. WE aim to enable anyone else to do the same for themselves; hence the open access global fruit map and free Seasonal id Sheets.

We are fortunate to have steady employment and often buy food in the shops, like everyone else but we will not be buying Apples, Pears, Blackberries, Hazelnuts, Walnuts, Apple Juice etc. this Winter, because we have stacks stored away. It does surprise me when I see people crushing fresh fruit under the wheels of there large vehicles, as they queue in dense polluting traffic in order to get to the overcrowded, overpriced sterile environment of the supermarkets.

These people could be out in a field, enjoying the open air and gathering organic Fruit and Nuts for Free, but the fact that they are not, means that there is always plenty left for those who are making the effort to forage.

Don't forget to put, the Urbane Forager book on your Christmas present list. 

Order your copy now!

You can buy this lovely book for your friends and family from all good book-stores or Amazon.

the Urbane Forager: Fruit and Nuts for Free

Author: Alan Gibson

ISBN: 978-1-78507-300-7

We now have our best images on Pinterest. Please follow & share.

Swimming with Apples

We paid a visit to Flemming Park for a swimming trip with the children. While we were there we checked out the Apple trees that grow in the leisure centre car park and were pleased to see that they were positively swamped with sweet red fruit...

Fortunately we had some buckets and fruit pickers in the car, not that we really needed them, I picked a lot just by reaching up with my hands. The children are accustomed to the fact that we are always busy harvesting Apples during September and they were out of the car in a flash. When they were young we allowed them to stand on the car roof to pick - they are too heavy for this now.

It's almost hard to know where to start when faced with this many Apples but my son, who loves climbing, was soon scrambling up among the branches. He started lobbing fruit down to my daughter who quickly set about honing her catching skills. Meanwhile, I used the picker to access the higher fruit and it did not take us long to fill our boot with a healthy 40kgs. 

These soft Summer Apples have a pinkish flesh and are quite sweet but do not keep well, so we will use our load for juicing. They should balance the large amount of cookers that we picked off a friend's garden based tree. There are plenty more Apples left on these trees, so get down there with some bags and boxes soon. If you do not have a picker or climber you can get people to hold out a blanket and then shake the branches but watch out for cars.

Also, please take a few minutes to nominate me for #GetOutside champion email getoutside@os.uk with a few words explaining why Alan Gibson (aka the Urbane Forager) would be a great ambassador. Include links to this blog and your favourite pictures from here too. 

First Fruity Fun of the Year

On the way back from a walk in the New Forest a couple of weeks ago, I  spied a big roadside Cherry tree laden down with scarlet fruit. I made a mental note that the fruit was plentiful and nearly ripe. We revisited the tree a week later and found a few more plus a couple of nice little Walnut trees in the same location.

This triggered a reminder to visit our favourite trees that we always pick locally. The Children were armed to the teeth with containers and pickers as we marched over Cobden Bridge to St Deny's.

The first tree initially looked fantastic and my son was soon up in the branches, however, not many of the red Cherries were fully ripe. We decided that waiting another week would be best.

We trotted around the corner to some other trees that we know and were greeted by a tremendous treefull of super ripe, sweet, black fruit, which we set about harvesting as quickly as we could.

My daughter seemed to be scoffing more fruit into her mouth than into the punnets, I warned her about tummy-ache but could not grumble too much. If it wasn't fun, the children would not enjoy coming, and this was the first fruit picking expedition of the year, always an exciting time.

Despite my daughter's best efforts, we still managed to return to base camp with 4.5 Kilograms of big fat cherries. More than enough to keep us all happy for a while and plenty to make into some delicious cakes or puddings.

A quick check on the Tesco website prices cherries at at least £2.00 per 200g, even more for organic fruit, which I'm quite sure ours was. This little hoard took us about half an hour to gather and there is still a great more than that waiting for us next week.

Eclipsing the Equinox

There might not be much to harvest from the hedgerows at this time of year but there is still plenty to get excited about.

The weekend of the 21^st 22^nd is when the Vernal (Spring) Equinox occurs. This is the first time of the year when the days and nights are of equal length; the second time is the Autumnal Equinox. The Vernal Equinox is also the time of year in the UK when the clocks get moved forward, so we loose and hour of sleep, which I could do without personally.

More excitingly, this week on Friday morning 20^th March in the UK we will experience a partial solar eclipse, (almost total sounds more fun). In Southampton (where we live) this will occur at about 09:28 with about 83% of the sun covered. Do not try to use sunglasses or anything else; looking at the sun, even during an eclipse is very dangerous and can damage your eyes. The simple and safe way to watch the process is to make a pin-hole camera, or use a small mirror to cast the image onto a plain wall. You can download the Royal Astronomical Society leaflet here.

You will need your eyes to be working at their best during the coming months to spot all the beautiful blossom that is bursting out all over the trees in Spring. This bloom will hopefully be the precursor to vast amounts of free fresh fruit, which you will then be able to access and eat. If you can’t eat it all at once you can transform it into pies,cakes, puddings, jams, cordials, chutney or anything else that comes to mind.

You should also be adding the trees locations onto the FallingFruit map, this way you and other people will be able to locate them more easily in future years.

The Urbane Forager Book Update…

Swift progress is being made during the Spring on the Urbane Forager book and we are now in the final stages of the design work.

If you want to receive updates on the progress of this project, please notify me via the contact pages here or on our community website. Then we can invite you to the book release party and you can be among the first to own a signed copy.

I Spy Cherry Pie

We have been taking advantage of the sunny weather and collecting more Cherries in St Deny’s.

They're Big

This time the children and I found a lovely tree, laden with big fat ripe fruit that was just right for picking.

They're Tasty

We could reach some by hand and my daughter and I used pickers for the higher ones.

They're Easily Reached

My son, who enjoys climbing was placed into the lower branches, from where he scrambled up and proceeded to drop any Cherries that he could not fit into his mouth, into our pickers.

They're Coming Home!

It was only a short while before we were trooping off, back over Cobden Bridge; our faces and fingers smeared with juice and bearing our trophy of a large Tupperware box overflowing with tasty red fruit.

Falling Fruit - Mapping Monster

Recently, I have been working collaboratively with the Falling Fruit group. You might notice a dense cluster of links around Southampton where all of my local fruit map coordinates have now been added to their global master map. There is a permanent link to this map on my blog's left hand side bar. 

Now the Falling Fruit team are attempting to raise funds for a app which will make this information available to all. They have already reached their initial funding goals and are now looking to achieve more advanced targets. I fully support Falling Fruit in their objectives and wish them every success with the project. what follows is a message from them...

Here’s why it’s important: Falling Fruit is like Wikipedia for fruit trees. It’s an open, collaborative map of free food sources all over the planet. We have more than 600,000 locations mapped so far. People all over the world use our tool. Hundreds every day. It’s kind of unbelievable. We have no idea how that happened.

Well, maybe we do. Over the last 18 months, we have built the site entirely in our free time, devoting literally thousands of unpaid hours to its development. We’ve also paid for the hard costs (server fees, filing fees, etc.) out of our own pockets.

We believe that a giant map of free urban food sources makes a compelling argument: there is enough food to go around. Food doesn't have to be a commodity. We have the capacity to produce enough good food for everyone and a lot of it, right in the cities where the bulk of people live. We want people to experience picking an apple, or cherries for a pie, or a handful of warm mulberries on a summer day. We want to convince your city to plant more food for you, not more crepe myrtles.

If we can raise funds to develop an app, we think that we can sell it for a few bucks and use that income to permanently cover our costs. We want Falling Fruit to stay free, open, and available to all. We simply can’t afford to keep paying for everything out of pocket. As the user base has grown, the site is has become too costly to run. If we don’t reach our goal, we’ll have to use ads, or make a portion of the site not free. We don’t want to do that.

If you’ve already contributed, Thank You! So you know, you can pick a different “perk” at any time. We’ve added a number of new perks since launching the fundraiser which you might want to check out. Honey, photographic prints, cookbooks, caramel apples etc. 

If you haven’t contributed, can you help? Even if you don’t have any cash to spare, can you help spread the word?

https://www.barnraiser.us/projects/fallingfruit-org-mobilize-the-urban-harvest

Mansbridge Community Orchard Update

Thanks to backing from Southampton Airport Community Fund, we have been able to buy new tools and equipment for use in the Mansbridge Community Orchard. We may also need to get some professional training.

We have purchased pruning equipment; loppers, saws etc as well as picking tools. Renovating a neglected orchard, with many mature trees, will be a lengthy and on-going commitment. It will take several years to get the main trees into a decent state and longer still to sort out the less accessible areas.

In the Autumn, the real fun begins. We will begin to reap the rewards of the project; we will need to buy more fruit picking and collecting gear to help us gather the apples. We also aim to purchase processing kit, like a nice big fruit crusher and a lager cider press.

The Orchard is beginning to flower now and we must organise another Blossom Walk (provided these gales don't blow it all away). Last year we had perfect weather for the walk and had a great turn out. It is the ideal way to get to know the orchard and to familiarise the locations of all the various trees. It is much easier to recognise the fruit trees, when they are covered in bloom. It will also be a good opportunity to recruit more volunteers who want to help manage and get involved with all the other activities in the orchard.

Pressing Issues - Juicy Gossip

We decided that we needed to press the remaining apples, which were hanging around in the house in two huge buckets.

The children had let it be known that this time they wanted to be rewarded for all their hard work and contributions, by something like their own weight in apple juice. They said it was unfair that the last five gallons all got turned into cider, which they cannot drink.

As we had four children on hand to help us with the carrying, pressing and milling, I figured that a bottle each, as well as several cups, of gorgeous fresh apple nectar would be sufficient payment.

Once the procedure got underway everything started to happen, swiftly. The Head Chef was slicing and the kids were ferrying buckets of chopped apples up the garden to the mill; here, the crank was turned enthusiastically until the big bucket underneath was full enough.

Then the bucket load of pommace was emptied into the press, which was in the workshop this time, and the screw was turned down until the juice cascaded into our waiting buckets, bottles and cups.

I have to say that the children did a fantastic job, their boundless energy was a valuable resource and I was mainly relegated to making sure fingers stayed out of the scratter, occasionally applying a little extra muscle to the press and of course hosing all the kit down afterwards.

Once the youngsters had drunk their fill and been sufficiently paid off with bottles of juice for later, I was left with two gallons that I put into demijohns to ferment. I added a little cinnamon stick to each batch because I think this adds a subtle extra essence and somehow seems appropriate as the cold and gloomy evenings creep in on us.

Pair of Pears Repair

I was delighted to notice that work on the new allotment site on Somerset Rd is nearly finished; it looks like it will be a lovely site/sight. I was even more pleased to observe that the pear tree that had been cut down in its prime has now been left to regrow (something it is undertaking enthusiastically), on the outside of the new fence.

The Pear Tree is the Dark Green Bush in the Centre

I rowed past the Pear Pirates scene too recently; despite being felled, this poor tree is also trying its best to regain its former glory. But pear trees, like walnuts, grow very slowly. So, despite my renewed optimism, I can’t help thinking that it would have been better not to have chopped them down in the first place.

Apple Day at Mansbridge Community Orchard

The day was overcast and I had been outdoors since 9:00, my son had been playing rugby at a tournament.  Now it was 2:30 and we were heading to Mansbridge, to take part in the Apple Day Picking and Pressing event.

I’m pleased to say that the Southampton Woodcraft Folk have taken an active role in the Mansbridge Community Orchard; this event was planned and organised by them, but open to all.

We arrived, slightly late and the scene was one of tremendous animation and bustling activity. There was a big tent, lots of tables and benches, two presses, a fruit mill or scratter and loads of apples and pickers.

Everyone was doing something; bodies were crowded around tables and children were scurrying about everywhere. There was even a group of people knitting, jointly weaving a strange and interesting article (Possibly a Christmas jumper for an oddly shaped child).

After brief greetings and introductions, we recruited a small group of friends and children and set off into the trees to fill our large bags and buckets with apples.

As we picked and collected, various other participants were ferrying the vast amount of apples back to the base camp in the containers.

Back at the trestle tables, a smoothly run sequence of events was being meted out, processing the apples into juice...

The fruit was first fleetingly washed. The cores were removed and the apples sliced, by deploying a cunning little kitchen instrument that did the job in one swift action (I must get one of these).

The chopped apples were tipped into the scratter, which was powered by strong and enthusiastic children. The pulp was then emptied into the press and the screw turned down by many keen helping hands and the delicious fresh juice flowed out into waiting receptacles.

Finally, the remaining apple mush, minus the precious juice, was taken back into the trees and left to nourish the ground and wildlife.

It was a lovely, friendly event and even when it started to drizzle about 4.00, most people seemed oblivious to the weather and carried on with the communal fun.