Falling Fruit Ireland
Falling Fruit originally only in Dublin, 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.
FUTURE PROJECTS
• Establish local and Country Level Falling Fruit Groups: Eventually, it will take time. For this, volunteers are needed to set up local groups.
• Strengthen Long-Term Charity and Organizational Connections: 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.
• Create Sustainable Habits in Local Communities: 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.
• Jam Making and Cross-Functional Workshops: We would like to organise jam-making and preserving workshops and cross-cultural cooking workshops with different user groups of all ages.
• Orchard Discovery: 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 encouraging the health and long life of the trees.
•Local Council Involvement: We would encourage the local council to plant new fruit trees, especially nut varieties on public land. We would also encourage people to grow fruit and nut trees in their gardens.
• Organization Expansion: We are interested in extending the Falling Fruit project to other natural resources, such as wild food foraging.
We at Falling Fruit are very grateful to Nika Russell for the website design and creation. She has given her time, skills and advice freely for this project. Further valuable help has been given by Cheryl Hazenberg and Emily Burke. Deep appreciation to all three. 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.
