admin's blog

Calgary Harvest’s first full season was a huge success! About 50 volunteers picked fruit from over 100 registered fruit trees. The fruit was distributed to a wide variety of people: homeowners, volunteers, food bank and homeless shelter clients, and farmer’s market customers. Essentially, this project grew way faster than expected, and we quickly became swamped! While we did manage to get to just over 100 trees last season, there were almost 400 registered when the harvest season was over! 

We are looking for coordinators who will be responsible for directing the local harvest in their own neighbourhood. We would love to find coordinators for each community in Calgary! Calgary Harvest is much more than a local fruit distribution network. It brings people together, forming new friendships and building and strengthening communities. This is your chance to be a part of that community building!

We had such a successful season this year, and we cannot thank everyone who helped out enough! New friendships were made, so many fresh and tasty fruit was picked, and so many homeowners met the volunteers and had a delightful experience. Next year, watch out! This project is going to triple in size! Check this out: http://www.calgaryherald.com/Fruit+rescue/3810960/story.html   

If you are adept at MS Excel (including writing macros in VBScript) and/or knowledgeable in PHP code, and wish to donate a small amount of your time to a good cause, WE NEED YOU! The Calgary Urban Harvest Project is growing extremely quickly, and with so many registered trees and volunteers, we need put put our computer to work matching up volunteers with trees and all that. As we have no funding, I am doing it manually and its resulting in full time unpaid work (I love doing it, but I have put my day job on hold as a result).

This is a short little addendum to the previous post. I just wanted to let everyone know that we picked a lot more than apples. We also brought home approximately 40 pounds of plums, and 80 pounds of Evans cherries!. Foraging today was a little wet, but the yields were sooo worth it! Here are some shots of the team at work.

Our first harvest of the season took place today on Saturday September 3, 2010. Actually, this our first officia harvest for Calgary Harvest! With 11 volunteers, we broke off into four teams and the estimated total fruit picked was over 2000 pounds of fresh and tasty apples.

It's happening and it's exciting!  The Calgary Urban Harvest Project is already set up for a busy picking season this year, and the leaves are only just coming out.  We have over 27 registered homeowners who have fruit trees on their property.  This is very exciting as we have plans to put this yield into productive use and make it available for Calgarians, in the form of fresh produce, juice, and other goodies!