These bins were totally filled and I still have another load to grab from the community orchard. I had to pick the ones that were weighing down branches without the potential for growing well. They’re not ripe yet but are usable and I didn’t want to dump any I could save. I also have like 50kg of semi-ripe plums to pickle and turn into wine. The apple butter will go with some homemade bread.
Ohhhh yeah! Both of those ideas are awesome. More edible parks and things would be so nice! Just gotta get a lot of people on board for upkeep
There’s this group in my town that does food rescue from a bunch of grocers and they started this free grocery, where people can go and “shop” instead of getting a pre packaged food box. You sign up for a time and get access to a bunch of organic produce, bread, sweets, they have all kinds of perishables both vegan and non too. From what I remember one dream was to be able to rent a space and open a kind of community kitchen where they could do free cooking classes and stuff; I hope they are able to do it one day
Upkeep is definitely the barrier for us planting more. Ideally I’d love to turn every park into some combination of pollinator habitat, wildlife sanctuary, community gardens/food forests, and interpretive/demonstration spaces. It takes a full-time crew of 5 horticulturists to cover what we have though and volunteers are really hit-or-miss for complex plant work. Eventually I’m using that example in some Marxist green urbanist theory once I have a handle on how the economics and public relations side work.