Welcome to 510 Fruits

510 Fruits came into existence because I love fruit and foraging and jam making. I love the bounty of seasonal produce and I came to love canning and jam making when I learned how hard it is to actually use all the fruit from a tree when it ripens. After processing my own backyard fruit, I began to see fruit everywhere I went. Thus the initiation into forage. Foraging in my neighborhood has taught me about the often overlooked bounty of our streets and backyards and has been a great way to meet neighbors, build community, and more efficiently share in the season's offerings.

As my love of fruit and jam has become an obsession, the stack of jam in my house has grown to waist high and wobbly. I realized I needed a way to get the jam out of my house as fast as I seem to be making it. Thus 510 Fruits and this attempt to share the variety of locally foraged and harvested fruits I have made into jams, marmalades, fruit butters and canned. Selling is not about making money, but just about covering the cost of jars and ingredients so that I can go on making more jam.

On the label, the byline "local forage" means the fruit is foraged from my yard, friends' and neighbors' yards, and streetside. The byline "local harvest" means I picked the produce at a local u-pick farm. Names also include more specific information, usually the street name of where the fruit originated.


Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Tis the Season to Give Jam

The Holidays are fast upon us. If you are thinking of gifting jam this year, you may want to place your orders soon. The sticky, yummy, foraged, local sweetness in a jar will definitely sell out.

Pears, Pears, and More Pears

For the second year in a row, my generous neighbors on Fulton Street have shared the bounty of their gianormous pear tree with me. This year I harvested not just from the ground with the trusty fruit picking pole, but also from their roof with the trusty fruit picking pole. It was the end of the season, the tree had been well harvested, I picked 4 HUGE grocery bags full (with the help of their 6 year old and 8 year old), and the tree was STILL full of fruit. Voluminous masses of pears! Even the compost bucket full of pear peelings as I canned and jammed was voluminous!

Poached pears, dried pears, pear jam, pearsauce (like applesauce but better), pear butter, what else can one do with pears? This year's yield: over 80 jars of various pear yummy-ness.