Abundance Edinburgh is a climate challenge funded project in Edinburgh which collects surplus fruit grown in the city and redistributes it to charities or put it to other good uses.
They currently need help locating fruit sources in Edinburgh and with storage for their equipment. Maybe one of our eco-congregations can help? Here is a message from Abundance Edinburgh:
We are a group of people interested in putting to good use fruit that would otherwise go to waste and organise associated events around this. In Edinburgh, we harvest fruit from gardens, do some foraging and have also picked apples at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital's orchard. We give some of the fruit away (for example, last year some went to the Grassmarket Project) and use some to promote seasonal and local food (for example, we did some preserving workshops and had a public apple pressing event). We have some equipment at our disposal, including several apple presses (thanks to the City of Edinburgh Council).
We're looking to spread the word about our activities both to get more people who are interested in picking fruit and using it but also to reach out to people with fruit trees that aren't able to harvest them themselves or who have too much fruit than they know what to do with. We're also on the look out for partnering up with other groups to do events with and to create local Abundance cells.
We currently have a problem at the moment in that we don't have any premises of our own and are using a variety of private and public spaces to store equipment and fruit in harvest season. This could potentially be where the Eco Congregations might like to get involved with Abundance Edinburgh - some churches might have spare cellars or rooms that could be used as local hubs for fruit storage and distribution.
You can contact Abundance Edinburgh through their web site:
http://www.abundanceedinburgh.com/about/
A leaflet is available to download
here (pdf file).
