I hope you all had a fabulous holiday and are well into a great new year so far. Things have been quiet with OFRE so far this year, but we have an exciting short notice announcement to make!!

A great event being held tomorrow called the Local Money Summit is taking place tomorrow evening (Tuesday, Jan 31) from 6:30-8:30pm @ The Edmonton Room in Stanley Milner Library. Suggestion donation $15. The proceeds for the event will be going towards OFRE & e-SAGE. Did you know that OFRE is run primarily by volunteers? Come to this great event to learn more about how you can contribute to a local economy, and see money go towards two great local organizations.

Event details:

The power of the shop local message has become evident. Yet, we hardly give a thought to other, more important questions. Namely, given global economic uncertainty and the downsides of traditional investing it’s time to start talking about how we get a more rewarding and productive experience from our various money related activities like banking, investing and giving.
What we do with our money isn’t something that comes up in casual conversation yet now, more than ever, this subject requires a frank discussion. If you want to invest, bank, and give in a way that’s ethical, local and helps your community you should come to this event.

There will be four brief presentations and a panel afterwards. The four speakers are:

• Mark Anielski –The author of the Economics of Happiness will explore opportunities for we can invest locally, including the possibility of a local GIC, investing in the Edmonton Community Foundation to help local entrepreneurs, a local Edmonton-KIVA and other options.

• Nadine Riopel – How do we make sure the money we give makes a difference? Former fundraiser Nadine Riopel (The Savvy Do-Gooder) will use real-world examples to explore the pros and cons of local and international giving. What advantages does giving locally offer in our quest to make the most of what we give? How can we increase our odds of creating the change we want to see in the world?

• Jesse Radies – The founder of Live Local will be fresh off a meeting with the Business Alliance of Local Living Economies. She’ll be delivering a big picture talk on the kind of economic development that Edmonton really needs.

• Jeff Senger and Dan Ohler – were key players in the founding of the Sangudo Opportunities Development Cooperative. This first-of-its-kind local investment cooperative leveraged financial capital from community residents to preserve and grow an essential piece of local economic infrastructure. And the story doesn’t stop there: in only 18 months, this group of fierce action takers has gone on to successfully finance a community restaurant start-up, as well as a massive plant expansion; the speed of which have traditional rural government economic stimulus organizations scratching their heads in disbelief. Dan and Jeff have delivered numerous presentations around the province, as they are convinced that their idea can and will work in most any community – urban or rural – provided they have the right key ingredients. Come out and discover how your community could put its share of over $4 billion dollars (annually) of local Alberta investment dollars to work building jobs, hope, community resilience, and impressive financial returns right in your own neighborhood!”

• Duncan Kinney – Host and panel moderator. Director candidate at Servus Credit Union.

Mike Johnson, the team lead for the project, put together a great progress report that captures the people involved, the ideas, the design questions we tackled in building a pedal powered crusher that can work for a variety of people who differ in age, height and body weight. Here is our OFRE MEAET Presentation given at MEAET 1.0.

OFRE has put together a funding proposal for the Aviva Community Grant competition and needs your support. This is a social grant and making it into the semi-finals depends on getting enough votes from people who support your project.

What does OFRE hope to do with the funding?

We hope to secure a space in the city for OFRE to process cider from Edmonton grown apples, host canning workshops and help people develop food preservation skills, develop a small lending library with resource materials for members, pay for a coordinator position for 1 year, and buy cold storage units to keep fruit fresh until it can be processed. OFRE has run on the goodwill of volunteers for the past 3 years without adequate funding and needs funding to continue. We have a solid plan in place to grow sustainably, benefit the community, and give back to Edmontonians.

We love rescuing fruit, sharing in with charitable organizations, and teaching Edmontonians about local fruit. Please read our proposal found in the link below for more information.

Help OFRE win by voting for us! Every vote counts and your support means a lot to us!

Voting runs from Nov 14th (today) until Nov 30th.

Click on this link: http://www.avivacommunityfund.org/ideas/acf12914

Then register in Aviva and get voting! You have 15 votes and can vote for each idea once per day.

Thanks again and wish us good luck! If you have any problems, let me know and I’ll do my best to help.

So, hoe hoe hoe, off we go to the farm! All the veggies were dug by hand and the farmer had a belgian horse team and sled that rode around and picked up the veggies. the kids had a great time riding on the sled with the veggies!

We had helpers big and small and found humour in the day. Check out these two carrot buddies and giant beet!

Most humour was found in calling ourselves city slickers once we realized how many root veggies CAN grow in a 1/4 acre area of land. oy!

The beet, carrot, and onion piles! SOOO many veggies!

Not only did we get to rescue veggies, but we got to eat some too. Ther farmer was so excited about us coming out to the farm, he and his wife planned a pig roast for the gleaners! They roasted the pig that morning while we were gleaning, then we brought up some fresh dug veggies for roasting. YUM!

OFRE brought cider to share with everyone. After all that digging, the delicious food was devoured!

The fun didn’t end there. In true OFRE fashion, the rescued veggies were split into 1/4 shares for the farmers, ofre gleaners, charities, and a portion for OFRE canning/pickling events. After dividing all the veggies up, OFRE gleaners spread the charity share with: Strathcona County Food Bank, Edmonton Food Bank, Youth Emergency Shelter, and the Ronald MacDonald House.

Here is Mike Johnson dropping off a portion at the Edmonton Food Bank. This cart weighed in at: 120 kg of veggies!

For this event, OFRE volunteers met on a Monday evening and together made 2 delicious jam recipes:

• Pear & Vanilla Bean Jam
• Pear & Ginger Jam

The Pear & Vanilla Bean Jam recipe uses real vanilla beans that are first scraped out to remove all the beany goodness inside and then the beans and scraped bits are put to simmer in the pot with the pears. The smell of this jam on the stove is heavenly! After the beans have simmered, they are removed and the jam is pureed in the blender to make a smooth saucy jam. Molly declared it’s quite amazing on ice cream!

The Pear & Ginger Jam recipe uses chopped crystallized ginger and keeps the pear chunks in whole form, so the slices end up suspended in the jam. Crystallized ginger as  well as the whole vanilla beans can be found at the Italian Centre Shop. The scent of the ginger awakens you senses and is a nice complement to the pear. This recipe was my mom’s recipe and I always loved this jam. Thanks for sharing mom!

We strive to teach OFRE volunteers canning basics at our workshops, which means volunteers get involved in all aspects of the process from: chopping, stirring, mixing, and canning. It’s always a pleasure to host these events because many of our volunteers have experience doing as well as an interest in canning. We all seem to learn something new from each other at our canning events, which makes if quite fun for everyone.

Both jams turned out really nicely and their was enough for everyone to take home 1 jar of each kind. The new jams have been also been a hit at our stand @ the Alberta Avenue Farmers Market.

This coming sunday is the Annual Fruit Grower’s Festival at the Devonian Gardens. If you have never been for a little trek out of the city to this place, you should go! It is a beautiful setting with a variety of different types of gardens perfect for a afternoon stroll with your sweetie. With courses, workshops, educational events, and expert gardeners on hand, it also a place of learning and discovery.

This weekend is all about fruit and growing fruit in the Edmonton area. The event runs from 11am-4pm. There will be experts you can ask your tree questions to, bring apples to for identification, listen to a lecture on dehydrating fruit techniques, fruit tree & shrub landscaping, and other topics, or stop by and see OFRE and learn about making fresh-pressed apple juice!

Fresh-pressed cider

OFRE volunteers will be making fresh pressed apple juice for tasting! Stop by and see how it’s made, talk to the volunteers to ask them about picking fruit in the city, and have a taste! $1/glass with all proceeds going towards OFRE.

This past weekend, OFRE volunteers trekked outside the city to pick apples on a farm in Namao. The owners had 15 different types of apple trees!

They were kind enough to label all the trees for us by name so that we could learn what different types of apples grow in Alberta. Some of the names of apples we picked were: Norkent, Norland, Rescue Apple Crabapple, Dongo Crabapple, September Ruby, and Fall Red Apple.

Since we had such a large place to pick, we invited lots of pickers and with lots of pickers, why not hold a fruit mob and see how fast we could all pick one tree! Neighborhood fruit captain, Mike Johnson oriented all 8 pickers on how to do a fruit mob and led the attack.  It was picked in 18min and 59 sec. Way to go fruit ninja’s!

Everyone had a fun time, it was beautiful weather, and it was a pleasure to take a short jaunt out of the city and hang out in a farm orchard for the day. Our hosts were kind enough to make us fresh carrot juice from carrots them had just picked in their garden. How nice! It was delicious too! Our youngest little helper was a bit pooped by the end of the pick, but was a joy to have around. She got passed among the pickers as we entertained her with cuddles, apples, and explored the orchard with her.

With such a nice orchard, we got to thinking of other ways we can work with this grower and suggested doing a group pruning event to give his trees a needed trim and enable other fruit growers to learn techniques for pruning their own fruit trees. They were quite excited about the idea, so we are going to work on this and try to plan an event in the off season. It’s best to prune fruit trees after the harvest and before spring. Stay tuned!

So what did we accomplish this long and labourious weekend?

• Most number of picks organized in one weekend (7)
• Largest geographic area covered in one weekend (St. Albert, Bonnie Doon, Millcreek, Buylea Heights, Castledowns, Oliver)
• Most number of picks in one day, Labour Day Monday (4)
• Amount of fruit picked (still need to weigh it…but it’s taken up a significant portion of my yard)
• Possibly the largest variety of fruits picked: apples (several types), crabapples ( a few types), chokecherries, red currants.
• Highlight: Apple crushing Garburator is built! Thanks to the amazing handiness of Mike Johnson for getting a brand new garburator on kijiji for a steal and turning it into an awesome apple crushing machine! (photos coming soon)!

It was a weekend of firsts for OFRE. Congrats to everyone for their hardwork! We have come a long way this year in many ways: the number of pickers we have attracted to our organization, getting some much loved media attention (Edmonton Journal, CBC, Radio-Canada), winning our first grant, our stellar new logo and postcards, winning our first grant, producing cider for the Alberta Ave Farmers Market!

I hope there is more exciting things to come for OFRE in the coming months and we will look back at this at the beginning of many exciting things. I have lofty dreams for our little organization. I hope someday we have a space in the urban core where we can teach and help people not only find the fruit hidden in our city, but educate and learn from each other on how to sustainably grow fruit within our urban environment. A place where the wealth that urban food production can bring to spaces, places, and people’s lives is spread and share with others.

Fresh-pressed Apple cider. Yum!

Operation Fruit Rescue debuted at the Alberta Avenue Farmer’s Market last night. We had an amazing time connecting with other Edmontonians and relished in the opportunity to tell them about OFRE and show them some of the fabulous things that OFRE volunteers have been making out of OFRE’s share of the fruit this year. We had our award winning sour cherry & amaretto saucy syrup, which sold like hot cakes, spiced saskatoon jam, cider jelly, and fresh-pressed cider! By the end of the evening, we had SOLD OUT of everything but the cider of which we only had a couple of bottles left. Wow! Thanks everyone for coming out to the market and supporting OFRE.

We look forward to attending next week. Come find us @ the market on Thursday evenings from 5-8pm. For the next couple of weeks the market is still outdoors, then we move into the community league hall for the winter months. It’s one of edmonton’s few year round markets, so drop on by all year!

Many of our volunteer pickers are not only interested in harvesting and eating local food, they also want to learn how to preserve the fruits of their harvest. Many of the traditional canning/preserving skills have been lost, but there is a keen interest among the younger generations in learning these skills and making food in a more sustainable way.

With this in mind, we have started to host canning, preserving, and cidermaking workshops for our volunteers. The goal of these workshops is threefold: 1) educate each other on canning and preserving practices and recipes, 2) make products to distribute among members and 3) to generate a source of revenue for OFRE through sales of items made from OFRE fruits. Fresh products made my volunteers using Edmonton grown and harvested fruits doesn’t get much more local OR sustainable than this!

OFRE now has 460+ growers in our list and I feel that we have barely scratched the surface of how much fruit is actually grown in the city. To think about what is here in terms of quantity as well as variety is quite mind-boggling, especially when you think that 1 apple tree can produce 200+ pounds of fruit in a season!

With this many growers, we gather a lot of fruit! So, making cider, jams, jellies, etc. is one way for OFRE to get through the fruits rescued in such a way that this can be shared and enjoyed long after the season is over.

We will be making our debut @ the Alberta Avenue Farmer’s Market this Thursday (Sept 1st). In the summer, the market is outdoors and the market runs from 5pm-8pm. Look for our items at the Community Tent.