The first market day!

The market launched today, and not far from the tree launched with it. We picked a few bags full of apples, but much less than we had anticipated. The pears and peaches had already been harvested earlier in the season, and the apples are not yet in full production. It’s the beginning of the season so perhaps that’s why the harvest is smaller than we thought. But because I’m so new to this perhaps it’s just that I got overexcited when I saw the two orchards full of fruit, and thought there would be more! But Wendy also offered that we take some cauliflower, so that filled up our backpacks and paniers. Because this was the first run, I wasn’t sure how we were going to transport whatever we harvested. The small harvest meant that we could do it all easily without fossil fuels. I’m proud to say we biked it all to the farmers’ market from 1.3 km away!

It was a beautiful and sunny day, perfect for picking apples! I was somewhat prepared for the apple-picking extravaganza (including networking with friends and setting up a Facebook event) but hadn’t had much time/energy to think about the selling of the apples. Everybody was really excited about this endeavour, and readily lapped up the blemished apples (bless their souls…) We ended up selling them for $1 a quart, much less than we had planned, but this put the apples into people’s tummies, which is the purpose of this whole thing. I figure once we further develop our capacity to produce delectable apples (control the blemishes and make a larger crop) then maybe we can charge more to make up for the real cost of harvesting the fruit. But for now it’s more about showing off how this can really work.

Many people were eager to tell about their own fruit trees or other trees whose produce goes to waste in the city. I’m thinking of starting up some way of sharing that information so that we can develop a fruit tree map of our neighbourhood. There is so much potential to feed ourselves right here in the city…

Here’s the blurb that showed up in the first ever newsletter: