not far from the tree

As we prepare for this weekend’s preserving workshop, I’m scrambling to schedule picks so that we have enough fruit to preserve. We’ve collected so much fruit that I didn’t anticipate we could ever get rid of it too fast, but we have high hopes for the workshop and need the fruit to accommodate our plans.

We’ll be experimenting with some less-conventional preserving ingredients to try to make the workshop as local as possible. Rather than purchasing highly-processed pectin, we will be using crabapples that provide a natural gelling agent. And rather than use lemons that are not easily grown in Ontario (although I have seen a few on Davenport Road balconies that owners have wheeled outside for the summer!), we are using sumac drupes.

I regularly bike up Christie Street where crabapples (and some feral cultivated varieties of apples) flourish. The fruits are so abundant this time of year that they roll all the way down the slope to Davenport Road (the shore of ancient Lake Iroquois) and litter the sidewalk and bike lane as they go. So I climbed up into the bush and started my first public forage the other day, gathering crabapples into my bag and taking them home to store for the workshop.

Some passersby gave me curious looks, other seemed amused at what I was doing, and one stopped to ask a few questions. Even though I felt a slight sense of trespassing, there was nothing illegal about what I was doing. Trees on public property are available to be harvested. I checked this with tree experts with the City last fall, and although they were initially confused they quickly confirmed my suspicions.

In his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan explains:

“I wasn’t quire sure if picking cherries from a neighbor’s tree was exactly kosher, either by my lights or the law. But isn’t there some old legal principle that confers the right to pick fruit from trees overhanging your property? I did a little research and discovered that indeed there is. The Romans called it ‘usufruct,’ which the dictionary defines as ‘the right to enjoy the use and advantages of another’s property short of the destruction or waste of its substance.’ Bingo! Here was a venerable legal principle that spoke to the very soul of foraging.”

This Sunday, not far from the tree will be hosting a preserving workshop for a few lucky volunteers (it was first RSVP, first served). An amazing group of above-and-beyond volunteers have been planning every last detail of this workshop. They’ve worked so hard to pull this together, I’m sure their love and toil will come through in the taste of the preserves. They’ll be showing us how to make fruit leather, apple and pear sauce, and whole canned pears. Personally, I can’t wait to learn these skills, taste our concoctions, and spend six hours in a kitchen with these folks.

There is a substantial waiting list for the workshop, which goes to show that there is a real need to claim this fading knowledge and extend the harvest. Our hope is that if we succeed with this one workshop then next year we will be prepared to offer several workshops all around town, some of them open to the public. If you are interested in learning more about preserving but cannot attend the workshop, there are other ones around town and online articles and tutorials. Better yet, you might ask friends, neighbours, and family members who know their stuff if they’d be willing to offer a private lesson.

LEAF has been supportive of not far from the tree from the very beginning. Last weekend we co-hosted the Edible Tree Tour as part of their Toronto Tree Tours and we’ve swapped even more ideas on how to collaborate in the future. After all, fruit trees make up a significant portion of the urban forest - LEAF’s raison d’être.

Way back in July, after we’d only picked 60 lbs of fruit, LEAF arborist Todd Irvine did a mini harvest of his recently-planted serviceberry.

At the time, Suzanne and I had just harvested from a serviceberry at Spadina Museum and given them away as a sampler at the market. Most market-goers hadn’t tasted the serviceberry before, and were thrilled to try a new fruit. Serviceberries not only offer delicious fruit, but they are a native species that offer many benefits to Toronto’s ecosystem - such as our birds, bugs, water, and soil. The serviceberry goes by many other names: shadbush, juneberry, and some dispute that it is the same as the saskatoon berry. Suzanne’s favourite term for the fruit is “the cosmopolitan blueberry.”

I planted one on my tiny front yard this summer and am looking forward to my first harvest, hopefully next year. For the first year of picking, I’m impressed with Todd’s half-cup full!

Tags: serviceberry frontyard Todd LEAF Spadina

Close to 100 tour-goers showed up for today’s tasty jaunt! We took over the grounds of Spadina Museum and surrounding neighbourhood for one of the Toronto Tree Tours.

Some personal highlights:

• witnessing the smiles and conversations that erupted when participants got to taste the heritage apple varieties;
• learning about the engineering marvel of one particularly massive white oak branch on what is perhaps Toronto’s oldest tree;
• introducing Wendy Woodworth to speak, the heritage horticulturalist at Spadina Museum;
• having some time to relax in the orchards before the tour began;
• spotting a car with license plate “GRT OAK” while hearing Todd speak about Nordheimer Ravine; and
• passing by a neighbourhood fruit tree just when the owner came out to walk her dog, then her telling the whole group about the hassle of sweeping away the fallen apples (It wasn’t a set-up, I swear! She had no idea just how appropriate her comments were to the tour.)

Suzanne, the coordinator of Spadina Saturdays, led the apple-tasting portion of the tour and put in an incredible effort to prepare. She and a whole crew of volunteers helped to make today happen. After picking and tasting apples from the orchards, they each took home some love apples (aka tomatoes) - special heirloom varieties from the historic gardens, at that! - as a small token of thanks.

We sold over a bushel of Spadina’s heritage apples and several pounds of Ward 21’s backyard pears. Pretty exciting, considering they were bought by Jamie Kennedy Kitchens.

Not part of our normal operations, certainly. But when the last minute invitation arrived, we thought it’d be nice to participate. The fruit was used at the From the Ground Up event, a talk about urban agriculture by Michael Ableman and other panelists (including our new friend and author Liz Driver from the Culinary Historians of Ontario) followed by a dinner at the Gardiner Museum.

We seem to be stumbling into a number of nice pairings this fall!

Tags: "Spadina House", apples, city-crafted, fruit, heritage, local, museum, seasonal, urban agriculture

This Saturday, September 20th, not far from the tree is co-hosting one of the Toronto Tree Tours with LEAF and the TPSC.

We’ll be touring the grounds of Spadina Museum, tasting heritage apples grown on-site, spying at ravines and fruit trees in the neighbourhood, then ending up at Casa Loma for a spectacular view over the historic plains of ancient Lake Iroquois (otherwise known as downtown Toronto). The forecast says sunny and 22 degrees, so be prepared for a wonderful day.

Meet at the main entrance of Spadina Museum at 1:00pm, RSVP here before it fills up.

The Gladstone’s Harvest Wednesdays invited us to host a table at another one of their tasting events. This is always a great chance to meet great people and taste great food.

We shared a table with Ben of Monforte Dairy, who served up his classic old cheddar with our fresh pears and apples. We couldn’t have planned a better pairing. One table over was Green Thumbs Growing Kids, a really inspiring group of children’s garden and food educators, whose work is mutually supportive of the High Park Children’s Garden where I got my start in urban agriculture. Laura Berman of Green Fuse Photos was nearby, with some photos from the time she visited our Spadina Saturdays program. We also visited with friends from Foodshare, Stoddart Family Farm, and 100 km Foods (who we will always tease about traveling 99km farther than we do!). A friendly event, for sure.

Last week we picked from two Ward 21 properties in one afternoon, dropping the pears off to two of our partner agencies (Humewood House and NaMeRes) immediately after each pick. We had a multi-tiered approach at both houses, picking from the ground, on a picnic table, on ladders, in trees, and on a second-storey patio.

I thought one of these picks might put our running total over 2000 lbs of residential fruit picked, but it tallied just under (1957 lbs) when I got home. But, as luck would have it, my excel document skipped a line - we’re now at 2017! This is an impressive feat for our first year of picking, especially just in one neighbourhood, and there are still a few trees to go.

This backyard was made for jelly. A beautiful elderberry tree provides the bulk of the berries, and a crabapple tree makes for natural pectin. The fruit tree owner, who has long made her own jellies, showed off some of her canning equipment, shared a few jars with those who came to pick, and offered to host a jelly-making session at her place one day.

Since elderberries can make many people feel nauseous when eaten raw, this pick wasn’t immediately gratifying. The berries contain cyanide, but cooking rids them of the toxin. So I boiled mine down into the base for saft, a Scandinavian-style juice that I came to love while living in Norway.

The emails and phone calls keep coming, with Toronto fruit tree owners happy to find a use for their overly-abundant backyard pears.

We picked a total of six trees (apples, pears, elderberries, and crabapples) over the Labour Day weekend. Our volunteers were happy to offer their labour for this community initiative and were rewarded with a plethora of fruit. They have yet to unionize.

One unassuming tree was only 10 feet tall but offered us over 160 pounds of fruit (with many remaining on the tree). This has pushed our residential fruit tree total to over 1600 pounds! Another tree had a bonus crop of grapes entwined in its branches, which the folks at NaMeRes and Wychwood Open Door eagerly accepted.