Recently spotted at Briarcliff and Clifton. This passionfruit relative is easy to come by, but actual edible fruit is rare. If anyone can find one with actual fruit/seeds, I want it big time. You will be crowned ruler of the concrete jungle in honor.
Well, it seems that the folks over at Atlanta magazine decided that we were worth writing about. There’s a blurb about us in the August edition, out on newsstands now (or available here). We will be offering free autographs of these articles until the end of the year, after which time the price will be $1300. However, by our forecasting, our autographs will be worth much more on the open market at that point, and it’s still quite a deal.
On another note….we have also been named IMPACTOR of the month by Elemental Impact, a consulting organization for sustainable business solutions. Sweet!
And finally, thanks to everyone from the CDC that came out on last week’s pick — we just got the last of the apples off, and we’ve already just about matched our donation total for the entire year of 2009! We can’t do it without you folks, so I hope you’re know you’re appreciated.
Craig
Many thanks to all who came out to pick with us this past weekend! As you can see from our truckbed photo at the end of the day, we picked many hundreds of pounds of fresh peaches and apples, and were able to donate over 200 lbs. to the food bank at Druid Hills United Methodist Church.
We’re now running in to a problem we face every year: sorting. This is something we have to deal with all year of course, but once we start bringing in 300+ lbs of peaches or apples at a time, it gets to be a problem. We wash and inspect all of our fruit, and throw out a fair amount of bug-ridden or rotten fruit. Any of you folks have ideas as to how we might streamline this a bit? We’re thinking robots of some sort, or maybe just a giant, brillo-pad-lined tumbler.
It is with great pleasure that I hereby do proclaim upon this 21st day of July in the year 2,010 that the season for picking fruit is heretofore commenced!
And let it be known that from this date we as Concrete Jungle will be going out at least every weekend from now through October.
So….
Come pick with us! We’ve got a goal this year of donating 3,575 lbs (5 times as much as last year), and to be honest, I’m secretly holding out for donating 10 times as much. Either way, we need your help! Donate your trees! Come out pickin! Tell your friends!
How could you pass these up? They’re just out there waitin for you.
Traditionally, June is a bit of a quiet month…mulberries and serviceberries are pretty much gone, and lots of other things are still fattening up. While things have definitely been quiet around here, we’ve discovered a lot of exciting things on the horizon.
The first is that, by all accounts, this is going to be an absolute bumper crop of a year for fruit. Every fruit tree I can think of is well laden. We’re going to be working hard. We’ve added over 30 new points to the food map since the end of last year and the ability to filter out specific fruits on the map, so hopefully you can find something tasty for yourself.
The second is that for as long as we’ve been picking fruit in this city, we keep discovering new things, like plums, nectarines, blueberries, and cherries. We’ve got a small pick scheduled for this Sunday, 4th of July to try to get some of these in-betweeners. Nothing too time-consuming, and we’ve all probably got plans later on in the day anyways.
Hey folks, thanks so much for your amazing support tonight! For everyone wondering about picking, we will probably be getting started in late April/early May, as that’s when the mulberries come out, and that’s the earliest thing to ripen.
If you want to volunteer, absolutely drop us a line, and let us know what you want to do, what days you’re available, and what part of the city you’re in. Certainly the picking is a ton of fun, but we also need folks to scout out trees, post fliers, and of course tell that neighbor with the pear tree about us!
Our tentative plan is to organize weekly fruit picks during the season that will happen on either Saturday or Sunday, and so we’ll spend weeknights assessing what trees are ready and getting everything in place for the weekend.
Thanks again, and don’t be a stranger!
Craig & Aubrey
Maaaannnnnn! I didn’t even know pomegranates grew here, and I just happened to drive by a beautiful 60-year old tree that was full of weird-looking apples. This was a wonderful and very generous donation, and we’re thrilled to get it!
We’re going back on Sunday to pick some black walnuts and hopefully a few more pomegranates, so you should come along!
20 lbs of nice, fat little native persimmons. We don’t need no Fuyu or Hachiya to get down in A-town (not that we’d turn them away). Diospyros virginiana all the way. Yeah…
These little fellows were growing out in Tucker, GA at a car repair shop. A fellow there talked our ear off about topics far and wide, and was in love with persimmon bread. Our recipe unfortunately ended up tasting like spice cake and had no resemblance to anything with fruit in it.
Anyone got some good persimmon recipes? They’re delicious as is, but this dude really sold us on the bread. In his words, it’ll make you wanna slap your grandma, which I think is good.
We’re getting to some serious harvest time folks! I think our donation total has doubled in the past week alone, and most of that is from figs.
For those of you unfamiliar with figs, you’ve about a week left to class up that palate with some exotic fruit for very low expense and effort.
Here’s the only thing you need to know about figs: the ones that look the most pathetic are the best. That’s it. Figs get yellow, brown, then maroon, then kind of light purple. That’s what you want. Nice and saggy and delicate. You won’t be sorry. I have prepared the following chart to illustrate my point:
The important part there is the sudden increase in deliciousness right as the fig becomes a nice sad purple color. The deliciousness has actually never been measured beyond the bounds of this graph, so this represents the extent of all public knowledge about how delicious figs are.
It should also be noted that excessive handling of figs can apparently lead to grocer’s itch, so stay safe out there folks.
