Man… things really worked out in our favor yesterday. All yall that missed it really messed up. Within the first hour of our work day start we had a yard mule on the way to help out with the big weeds and an offer of more land in the neighborhood on which to plant.

Dana working the grilled cheese/PB&J station

We got way more done yesterday than I would have ever thought: land completely cleared, large compost bin built, neighboring fig tree rescued, existing fence posts cleared for trellising, and preliminary contour marking of the land for raised beds (see below) — basically our overgrown, weedy lot has been completely transformed and we’re now ready to plan out some beds and start digging! Many many thanks go to Dana, Nate, Hope, Lorenz, Grady, Dixon, LaMatra, Venece, Christina, Maggie, Magaggie, Manny, Stacy, Lilli, Chris, Randy, Rick, John and Dodger!

When we first received this property, we had two big concerns: water access and the slope of the land. The more we’ve been researching it, the more convinced we’ve become of permaculture and hugelkultur practices in particular as being able to address both of these issues — basically the practice of building raised beds atop of piles of rotting logs. The logs absorb loads of water, release lots of organic matter in to the soil, and even “self-till” the soil through creation of air pockets as they decompose. Supposedly, if the beds are built big enough (6 feet+ in height) you can get away without irrigation whatsoever. We’re not quite equipped to even take on that kind of experiment, but we’re going to do plenty of smaller beds and see how far we can get.

In order to do these raised beds effectively, they need to be built to follow the contour of the hill on which they lay. This makes it so that water traveling downhill hits the bed uniformly and doesn’t funnel to a single point and break through the bed. To do that, one uses an ingenious but simple tool called an A frame to mark out the contour of the land. We have done some amount of this already, and will be doing more next week. From there, we begin digging and laying logs.

So consider this an open call for lumber: drop it off at our site! We need lots and lots of wood for these beds, and the more we have, the more we can do and the bigger we can do.

And while we’re at it, let’s go ahead and plan our next work day for this Sunday, February 12th at noon. While our first work day was much more of a clean up day, this will be more of a planning day — contour marking the land, laying out paths between the beds, planting some fruit trees, and hopefully moving some logs around and digging some dirt as well. See you there!

Hey folks…we’re pretty to excited to announce that a generous benefactor has donated use of his land to Concrete Jungle, so we’re turning it in to a farm! It’s got lots of sunshine, a small stream, and tons of potential. Conveniently located in Sylvan Hills, the land is barely a 10 minute drive from downtown Atlanta. And the name? Well, it’ll make sense when you get there.

Our current plans for the farm include:

1. Grow lots of produce to donate, especially during our picking off-season
2. Plant lots of fruit trees
3. Start some beehives
4. Offer our volunteers new and fun opportunities
5. Get a little money for Concrete Jungle to hire a summer intern to help with the picking season

Things are still pretty open-ended in the design, and this means we absolutely want yall’s help in planning things and making it real. For now, we know for sure that we need to clean the land up, so we’re starting with that: we’re having our inaugural farm work day / meeting on Saturday, February 4th at noon. The farm is located in the empty lot next to 1117 Birch St.

Unlike our usual summer picking events, which tend to be at least somewhat well choreographed and organized, we are flying by the seat of our pants with our farm, which means this is your chance to help get a great urban agriculture project off the ground.

Since this our first work day, our tool supply is going to be somewhat limited, and it is highly encouraged that folks bring tools if they can. This would include weed eaters, lawn mowers, tillers, trash bags, loppers, pruning shears and rakes.

Our general wishlist is of course much larger and includes:

• Seeds (cucumbers, beets, bell and spicy peppers, greens, summer squash, carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, eggplant, flowers/herbs for pest control)
• Seedlings
• Mulch
• Garden hose and nozzle
• Organic pest control: neem oil, pyrethrin/pyganic, bt, horticultural vinegar
• Gloves
• Stirrup Hoes
• Shovels
• Flat Shovels
• Hoe
• Soft and Hard Rakes
• Organic Fertilizers
• Fence post driver
• T-posts
• Metal hoops for floating row cover
• 5 gallon buckets
• Backpack sprayer
• Large water totes/rain barrels

Long list right? Well, that’s okay. It’s a wishlist. We’re hoping that maybe 1 out of 50 people have something they’d be happy to donate to us and that things will all work out.

Look forward to seeing yall!

ALFI’s annual fruit tree fundraiser is just around the corner, and they’re taking pre-orders already. Get something! They’ve got all sorts of great, weird fruits for cheap and it goes to a great cause.

And not like we’ve got a horse in this race or anything, but you could always add your tree on to our map too and help out two great causes at once. Just sayin.

Thanks for the many kind words we’ve received from yall today! For those wondering, we have finished up our official fruit picking season for the year, but hope to have an exciting announcement some time in the next few weeks. And just over 3200 lbs! Not bad for a bad fruit year! That’s more than we donated in 2009 and 2010 combined.

In the mean time, we’re doing a lot of planning for next year and are trying to develop ways to grow Concrete Jungle in a way that lets us get more fruit but still be manageable. So if you would like to help us out in this less-glamorous-but-still-very-important aspect of Concrete Jungle, we would especially love to talk to folks that have experience growing/running nonprofits or social enterprises, folks with logistics/management expertise, tinkerers to build devices to make our lives easier, or anybody that would like to lend a hand in large-scale fruit wrangling. Thanks!

We are thrilled to inform yall that Concrete Jungle has just been awarded a grant from the Awesome Foundation to help make our food system more awesome! For those of you that know us and have been picking with us, you can probably guess that in our minds that this means things like giant stilts to pick fruit from high branches, giant nerf sticks to bat fruit out from trees, some sort of dog powered fruit-washer and maybe even a fruit picking robot that was at one point only a joke in a Ciderfest invite. Who knows for sure? Fun things to come soon!

Albo and Jess crankin out some fine apple mash

Somehow we knew that the announcement of 0% chance of rain on Saturday would bode well for us. This year’s Ciderfest was probably our finest yet, with the highest numbers of both dogs and little kids ever achieved. Thanks for the wonderful times everyone! Perfect weather, delicious cider, bumpin music by Dialect Trio, trampolines and all around mirth making. How can you go wrong? We demolished a serious pile of apples, and spent good time with great folks. We’ve even had several folks say they’re already marking their calendars for Ciderfest 2012 (date not set), so to everyone that missed it this year…well, y’all messed up.

We also like to use Ciderfest to present a preliminary summary of the fruit picking season, and you can see a small version of our 2011 season summary here. We never get to put everything we want to on there, unfortunately, but it does cover many of the high points.

See yall this weekend! Details coming soon!

One of the big things we’re really grappling with this year at Concrete Jungle is that the amount of fruit trees we now have cataloged is starting to get a little bigger than we can comfortably remember. We’ve had the map in place for a while, and that’s been super useful for us (and hopefully some of you as well) for planning picks from our computer, but a lot of what we do when we’re actually out and about is based on memory. Part of that is because it was never particularly convenient to pull up our map from a phone when we were out somewhere.

At the same time, we wanted to make these things convenient for others too; we love it when people tell us about trees and want people to be able to find fruit trees that are nearby.

So, here’s the official announcement of our mobile food map. It can be reached by pointing your browser to m.concrete-jungle.org/. You can go there in a normal browser, but it will look just like a really big Google map.

When you load the map, it will attempt to geolocate your current position. The accuracy of this is out of our hands and will depend on your wireless (cell/wifi) service. It will do the best it can, and in our experience over the past month or so, it’s usually pretty close.

Tapping the marker icon in the top right will turn on nearby fruit trees.

Markers that appear can then be clicked on to get more info.

If you want to add to a tree to the database, you can tap the marker-plus icon in the top right of the map. A draggable marker will appear.

After placing the marker and editing the type of tree, you can add it to the database:

We’ve had countless times where we’re out and about and discover some random fruit tree. Now we can pull up our map, have it locate us, and add it to our database in a matter of seconds. And when we’re out checking on a tree to pick, we can easily pick up on things nearby.

So give it a shot! We’re not programmers by trade, but we’re trying to make something fun and useful for all, so if something doesn’t work quite right or if we opened up a huge security hole we’ll do our best to get it straight. Enjoy!

Come on out folks, we’re meeting at 448 metropolitan place in east atl at 10 am. See you there!

Hey gang! We’re going to be meeting this Sunday to head up to Helen, GA to pick 70 apple trees up at beautiful Apple Mountain (yep) Golf Course. The trees are probably quite beautiful when flowering in the spring, but this time of year they drop fruit all over the course and they want us to get them out of there. So, obliging as we are, we plan to do just that.

Since it’s a golf course, we’ll be picking while folks are out there playing and are going to be arriving around noon thirty and will ideally be finished up around 2:30 in order to line up well with a lull in play. Since it’ll be fully hot during that time, we’ll be bringing plenty of cold cold water and popsicles and snacks, and then going swimming afterwards at a nearby swimming spot.

Sound fun? Come with us! We’ll be meeting at 10:30 am at 298 Nelms Ave in Candler Park. We’ll have a van and truck going up and each can carry 2-3 people in order to save room for apples. We’ll need a few folks to be willing to drive in order to carry everyone, but I’ll bet we can work that out. What you should bring is probably a hat, something to swim in, a towel’s always useful, and then maybe a little extra sunscreen in case we don’t have enough to go around.

So 70 trees in 90 minutes…think we can do it? We’ll need your help! Drop a line to let us know if you’re coming.

As we move our way through the 2011 picking season, we’ve noticed that something has been amiss: our fruit tree database has ballooned, we’ve met lots of good folks that are super interested in what we do and in helping us do it, had all sorts of media coverage, but our fruit yield has not increased significantly. Going back to a previous chart, we can compare number of trees that we have in our database versus how much we’re able to get from them (and thus donate) on a yearly basis:

That would be the yellow line according to the left axis, indicating number of fruit trees, and the filled in sections indicating amount donated each year.

From 2009 to 2010, the number of trees in our database doubled and our poundage of donated fruit tripled. Similar growth for 2011 (roughly 5-6 additional pounds donated for each tree added to the database) would put us on target for donating over 5,000 lbs this year. As much as we would love to do that, we certainly do not seem on track do accomplish it this year.

But why not? Certainly the logistics of picking many hundreds of fruit trees plays a part, and we’re coming up with innovative ways of doing that (to be the subject of an upcoming post). And there are of course factors that are out of our hands, such as that something is weird with Atlanta’s fruit trees.

We looked at our donation statistics and found a group of about 20 apple and pear trees that we’ve picked in previous years that really give lots of fruit. These trees accounted for 56% of all fruit picked in 2009 and 49% of all fruit picked in 2010.

This group of trees is basically responsible for half of everything we’ve ever picked, and every single one is empty this year. On top of that, just about every other apple tree that we know of and have seen this year is empty. Pears have fared slightly better, but their numbers are greatly diminished. Peaches were likewise almost nonexistent this year.

This explains our many pick cancellations as of late, for it’s been a real scramble to get things together each week and we’ve unfortunately not been able to do it a few times. Before any of you get too worried, Ciderfest will 100% still be happening, but will obviously not be featuring as many local apples. Details of that will be forthcoming as well.

So consider this is a call to action: if you see something that’s ripe, let us know! We working hard trying to find things, but having a few more eyes out there can’t hurt. Thanks!