ALFI’s annual fruit tree fundraiser is just around the corner, and they’re taking pre-orders already. Get something! They’ve got all sorts of great, weird fruits for cheap and it goes to a great cause.

And not like we’ve got a horse in this race or anything, but you could always add your tree on to our map too and help out two great causes at once. Just sayin.

Thanks for the many kind words we’ve received from yall today! For those wondering, we have finished up our official fruit picking season for the year, but hope to have an exciting announcement some time in the next few weeks. And just over 3200 lbs! Not bad for a bad fruit year! That’s more than we donated in 2009 and 2010 combined.

In the mean time, we’re doing a lot of planning for next year and are trying to develop ways to grow Concrete Jungle in a way that lets us get more fruit but still be manageable. So if you would like to help us out in this less-glamorous-but-still-very-important aspect of Concrete Jungle, we would especially love to talk to folks that have experience growing/running nonprofits or social enterprises, folks with logistics/management expertise, tinkerers to build devices to make our lives easier, or anybody that would like to lend a hand in large-scale fruit wrangling. Thanks!

We are thrilled to inform yall that Concrete Jungle has just been awarded a grant from the Awesome Foundation to help make our food system more awesome! For those of you that know us and have been picking with us, you can probably guess that in our minds that this means things like giant stilts to pick fruit from high branches, giant nerf sticks to bat fruit out from trees, some sort of dog powered fruit-washer and maybe even a fruit picking robot that was at one point only a joke in a Ciderfest invite. Who knows for sure? Fun things to come soon!

Albo and Jess crankin out some fine apple mash

Somehow we knew that the announcement of 0% chance of rain on Saturday would bode well for us. This year’s Ciderfest was probably our finest yet, with the highest numbers of both dogs and little kids ever achieved. Thanks for the wonderful times everyone! Perfect weather, delicious cider, bumpin music by Dialect Trio, trampolines and all around mirth making. How can you go wrong? We demolished a serious pile of apples, and spent good time with great folks. We’ve even had several folks say they’re already marking their calendars for Ciderfest 2012 (date not set), so to everyone that missed it this year…well, y’all messed up.

We also like to use Ciderfest to present a preliminary summary of the fruit picking season, and you can see a small version of our 2011 season summary here. We never get to put everything we want to on there, unfortunately, but it does cover many of the high points.

See yall this weekend! Details coming soon!

One of the big things we’re really grappling with this year at Concrete Jungle is that the amount of fruit trees we now have cataloged is starting to get a little bigger than we can comfortably remember. We’ve had the map in place for a while, and that’s been super useful for us (and hopefully some of you as well) for planning picks from our computer, but a lot of what we do when we’re actually out and about is based on memory. Part of that is because it was never particularly convenient to pull up our map from a phone when we were out somewhere.

At the same time, we wanted to make these things convenient for others too; we love it when people tell us about trees and want people to be able to find fruit trees that are nearby.

So, here’s the official announcement of our mobile food map. It can be reached by pointing your browser to http://m.concrete-jungle.org/. You can go there in a normal browser, but it will look just like a really big Google map.

When you load the map, it will attempt to geolocate your current position. The accuracy of this is out of our hands and will depend on your wireless (cell/wifi) service. It will do the best it can, and in our experience over the past month or so, it’s usually pretty close.

Tapping the marker icon in the top right will turn on nearby fruit trees.

Markers that appear can then be clicked on to get more info.

If you want to add to a tree to the database, you can tap the marker-plus icon in the top right of the map. A draggable marker will appear.

After placing the marker and editing the type of tree, you can add it to the database:

We’ve had countless times where we’re out and about and discover some random fruit tree. Now we can pull up our map, have it locate us, and add it to our database in a matter of seconds. And when we’re out checking on a tree to pick, we can easily pick up on things nearby.

So give it a shot! We’re not programmers by trade, but we’re trying to make something fun and useful for all, so if something doesn’t work quite right or if we opened up a huge security hole we’ll do our best to get it straight. Enjoy!