Falling Fruit Ireland 2017
Falling Fruit is expanding across Ireland – hence Falling Fruit Ireland. The aim is to set up Falling Fruit groups around Dublin and around the country to harvest the surplus fruit and vegetables locally and distribute them to those in need in the local community.
Projects for 2017 and further
- Establish Falling Fruit groups in each postal district in Dublin and in each county in Ireland – eventually, it will take time. For this, volunteers are needed to set up local groups.
- With expansion in mind we have set up this website*, but also a Facebook page* and a Twitter account. Please support – ‘like’ and ‘share’.
- We would like to expand into GLEANING! Gleaning is the act of collecting leftover crops from farmers’ fields after they have been commercially harvested or on fields where it is not economically profitable to harvest. This is very well established in the UK see here We need to establish contacts in Ireland for this and gather information.
We hope to create a list of contacts for groups and centres who can handle lots of fruit and vegetables of different quality and type on an ongoing basis. We can then give this information directly to people who have trees bearing lots of fruit, or surplus vegetables, and they can take the food there themselves.
The ideal development for us is that at harvest time people go out to harvest the fruit for and with their friends, family and neighbours and pass the surplus on to local community groups and institutions at street level. By valuing and celebrating nature’s abundance we hope that people will learn to care for and plant fruit trees
across the city in public and private land.
We would like to organise jam-making and preserving workshops and cross-cultural cooking workshops with different user groups of all ages in future years.
We would like to discover any abandoned commercial orchards. Groups nearer to the sites could be able to include these sites in their Falling Fruit projects!
- Pruning: We would like to offer pruning expertise to donors, allowing their trees to grow to their full size and to encourage the health and long life of the trees.
- We would encourage the local council to plant new fruit trees, especially nut varieties on public land, encouraging people to grow fruit and nut trees in their gardens and doing guerrilla fruit and nut planting.
We are interested in extending the Falling Fruit project to other natural resources, such a wild food foraging.
We, Falling Fruit, are very grateful to Nika Russell of ICAN for the website design and for help with social media. She gave her time, skills and advice freely for this project. This has been a huge help as Falling Fruit is a volunteering initiative without funding.
Thanks also to Eoghan Parle of WeShare who helped with the website – organising the technical aspects and funding the domain name registration. We are very grateful for his support and help.