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 17, 2009

Pears and Meeting New Neighbors

Last week I had my first experience of leaving a note in the mailbox of a neighbor I didn't know asking about fruit harvesting. They replied immediately with absolute generosity about sharing the pears from their enormous, old pear tree. In exchange, I left them jam from my apricot tree, and after processing their pears, returned to them some jam from their own tree. The experience was a classic in the reasons I love forage: As usual, the fruit was way too much for any one household, falling to the sidewalk, and making a mess. I was able to harvest pears from the very top of the tree with a fruit picker and give them back to the neighbors whose tree it was who hadn't been able to reach the top fruit. As I stood on the sidewalk picking fruit, other neighbors came by and chatted and I got to distribute the just picked pears to them. Not only was forage a re-distribution success, but I met a handful of lovely new neighbors!

Results: A dozen jars of Apricot-Pear-Ginger Jam and half a dozen jars of Apple Cider and Red Wine Poached Pears.
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