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, August 17, 2010

Geographic Neighborhoods and Virtual Neighborhoods

I have always loved about fruit, forage, and jam-making the way it brings me into closer contact with my geographic neighborhoods and neighbors--meeting people through the acts of sharing bounty and harvest. The last month has also taught me the sweetness of virtual neighborhoods and the ways they interconnect with these geographic ones.

Over the past month 510Fruits has been Facebook shared, list-serve posted, and written about in several online media sources and blogs. In addition to the sweet emails I have received from folks expressing appreciation for the remembrance of forage and neighborhood and home-made jam, the virtual neighborhood has actually brought me lots of contact with my geographic neighborhood as well. Neighbors I had not yet met have been emailing with offers of fruit, and Sunday I shared favorite jam recipes with one of these new neighbors as we harvested 15 pounds of plums (3 different varieties!) from his backyard trees. Now I will add plum butter, plum jam, and whole stewed plums to the 510Fruits offerings. Thanks Hans!

Here are a few of the recent articles about 510Fruits.

http://oaklandlocal.com/article/hold-jamming-510

http://www.triplepundit.com/2010/08/510-jams-churn-goodness-from-foraged-fruit/


Thanks for sharing in the bounty both virtually and more proximally!
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