Thanks to everyone that came out on our Critical Fruit Mass this past Sunday. This ride lets us touch upon what’s been going on in the Concrete Jungle, because it sort of caps off June and leads towards things really getting under way.

One of the big things we’ve been working on is being able to crowd-source our fruit tree database by letting people add fruit trees they know about. We’ve had this feature on our normal food map for most of this year, but we haven’t really talked about it much, so here’s the official announcement. Right…here.

Despite its quiet introduction, it has certainly taken off with the right people, as our fruit tree database has grown by leaps and bounds this year. After going through some old backups of the site, we prepared the chart on the left showing numbers of public and private fruit trees in our database. The dashed vertical lines represent dividing lines between years, and the ticks don’t correspond to anything except when we had a backup.

As can be seen from our map, it is still extremely centered on northeast Atlanta, with some slight progress west and southward, and our increase in fruit trees is really just filling in a lot of gaps. If we extrapolate our covered area as roughly 1/5th of the perimeter, there would be 4000 fruit trees within the entire perimeter. Whether or not that’s an accurate guess is another matter, but it’s exciting nonetheless.

And to help find all those trees, we’re making good progress on getting a mobile interface going. We had such an interface at one point, and the time spent loading code require to display the map killed any functionality it may have had, as you would sit there forever and then it would display the wrong location. Google has made leaps and bounds in improving mobile access in version 3 of their maps API, and relatively large amounts of code load quickly and responsively.

Currently the webpage geolocates your device and places a draggable marker on the map. You can then place it over your tree, click the marker button to edit its info, and upload it to our server. We’ve been using it for a few weeks now, and it’s been working very well. The draggable marker allowing you to add trees that you aren’t standing right next to, or if the geolocation doesn’t quite grab the best data.

For now, we’re probably going to stick with a web-based map rather than a native app. For one, it prevents us from having to code for Android, iPhone, Blackberry, etc. And there’s no app approval process to go through.

The downfall is that your phone has to connect to the Concrete Jungle server, download some code, interpret the code, talk to the server again, and then receive the map tile data just to render a map. A native app would allow for much less back and forth, which might prove useful for remote fruit/nut tree locations. We’re hoping that since we’re picking mostly urban produce it’s possible that we’re never too far from a cell tower and the increased latency is no big deal. We’ll know in a bit, as we’re pushing to have this public within the month, as well as start regular picking schedules again by next weekend. Stay tuned!

We had our first outing this past Sunday, and it was all we could ask for — weather was perfect, company was nice, and we got a whole gang of tasty berries.

Items of note:

• Serviceberries! These are a new addition this year, and me, Lisandro and Aubrey were pretty wary of them since we didn’t know what they looked like and had never eaten them. We eventually took a leap of faith and ate them. They’re great! Everyone I know minus one person loves them. To put it another way, serviceberries are also known as sugar plums. Now you know what those kids were dreaming about the night before Christmas. And, now that I know what they look like, I’m spotting them everywhere, so check out the food map for some places, and I can point you to some more if you’re having trouble finding them.
• People! We had an enthusiastic bunch of volunteers along with us. Trang, Pam, Hillary, Kirsten, Dougall and Maria — thanks a ton! I really hope we have yall out with us again sometime soon. We also encountered two lovely ladies while we were out picking serviceberries who were extremely complimentary of Concrete Jungle and they said our mothers had raised us right. Who could argue with that?
• Pie! You probably some idea of what happened here.
• Photos! You can see what you missed out on at our photo stream.
• Data! Now that we’re off to a new year our donation counter has reset and if you click on it you’ll get some brand new graphs that we’re looking forward to filling up over the next couple of months.

See you on Sunday!

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.