One of the main reasons we started City Fruit was to develop ways  to become more financially sustainable, rather than depend on an ever-shrinking pool of grant money for funding

As part of that, we’re experimenting with selling a small portion of the fruit we harvest – with a goal of selling no more than 20% of the usable fruit we harvest. So far this year, we’ve harvested 5,775 lbs. of fruit and have sold 448 lbs., so about 8%.

We always talk to home owners before selling fruit from their trees, explaining that the sale of this fruit goes directly to funding the neighborhood fruit harvests next year. We aim to be as transparent as possible and so will again release an annual report early  next year detailing how much we earned from fruit sales and how much it costs to organize our harvests.

Restaurants

We’re specifically targeting restaurants that have a reputation for caring about and seeing the value of using local foods as much as possible.  A couple of the places we’ve been selling to are A Caprice Kitchen and Kathy Casey. A Caprice Kitchen is even Tweeting about how they’re using our fruit:

“Be sure not to miss asian pear caramel pancakes at brunch this weekend, made with ballard pears from @cityfruit !”

And Kathy Casey featured us in her late summer newsletter, writing:

“Right now it’s Jam Time! It’s that time of year again when summer fruits are in abundance (despite this crazy weather!). We’ve been hooking up with City Fruit, a cool non-profit organization that gathers excess fruits from neighborhood yards then delivers them to food banks and restaurants. We love supporting them and are donning our sexy hairnets to cook up lots of great tasty treasures, which we will feature at Kathy Casey Food Studios annual open house this December … yes, we are thinking ahead!”

A few other ways in which the restaurants we’re selling to are putting our local fruit to good use:

• Crab apple butter
• Apple pies
• Escarole with Asian pears
• Red plum tarts

So far it’s been very exciting to see how the restaurants are using the fruit. They seem to really like the quality and variety of our local fruit and the customers seem to enjoy the food as well.

Farmer’s Markets

In addition to helping fund our harvests, one of the goals of selling fruit was to serve people who are low-income but don’t go to food banks or soup kitchens. In many places throughout the city, this population doesn’t have access to low-cost, healthy, local fruit.

To help address this, a portion of our fruit is sold to the New Holly Farm Stand and to the Clean Green Market. We sell fruit to each at a much reduced price so that they can then offer this local fruit to their customers at an affordable price.

New Holly Farm Stand is part of the Seattle Market Gardens program and most of the farmers are immigrants from South East Asia and East Africa. It’s a relatively new farmers market and operates every Wednesday from 4-7 p.m. It’s at the corner of South Holly Park Drive and 40^th Avenue South.

Clean Green Market was founded by Rev. Robert Jeffery (who along with City Fruit Executive Director, Gail Savina, was listed as one of Seattle Weekly’s Best of 2010), in an attempt to “supply fresh, wholesome produce to families in need in Seattle’s Central District.” The market is open from 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. on Fridays & Saturdays at the corner of 21^st and Fir Street.

We hope that these efforts to sell a small portion of fruit, as well as our membership program, classes, and donations, will help us reduce our dependence on grants and increase our financial independence.

We’ll keep you posted on how this experiment goes.

I’m happy to announce that we’ve officially launched an online store where you can buy all kinds of t-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, & stickers to show your support for City Fruit. 

All proceeds go towards helping fund our work to help residential tree owners grow healthy fruit, to harvest and use what they can, and to share what they don’t need.

 Thanks much to Cafe Press for providing the platform by which we can do such a thing. It’s a great website & store.

Be the first on your block to strut around in a City Fruit t-shirt!

A good profile/article in the NY Times about the growing number of people interested in venture capital dollars for sustainable agriculture businesses. They specifically talk about NewSeeds Advisors who’s mission is Building a sustainable food system, one company at a time. Hard to argue with that.

Venture capitalists are always looking for the next new thing and as a follow-on from their interest in environmental & energy issues, have turned their focus to agriculture. Although, agriculture is hardly a “new” thing. And there are a number of ways to currently invest in agriculture companies and projects. But would be great to see a serious effort to fund smart, sustainable ideas.

A bit from the article:

“Sustainable ag smells like clean tech, but it’s not so obscure that you’ve never heard of it but obscure enough there’s no competition,” said Ms. Yorio, who added that investors had approached her about bringing the Agriculture 2.0 conference to Canada, Europe and India.

So far the venture capital investments in sustainable agriculture have been modest. Mr. Matteucci said his firm had one investment in an agriculture wastewater treatment start-up and was reviewing other potential deals. Mr. Deshpande said Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers had invested in companies developing technology to deal with agricultural water and waste.”

Blue Mountain Cider Company in Milton-Freewater, Oregon (right next door to Walla Walla, Washington home to some of the finest wineries in the country), has a new take on the old motto ‘an apple a day…’: theirs is ‘An Apple a Day…One Glass at a Time’! One of City Fruit’s future projects is to use the not-so-pretty-apples picked from your garden in cider making. With donations from you, we can invest in a cider press, can teach classes on cider making, and help feed community spirit with another great hands-on learning experience.Be sure to check out Blue Mountain Cider Company’s Facebook page

Piggy-backing on what James wrote below, not only does City Fruit have great volunteers, great collaborators and partners, and great ideas, but…we have donors, we have members!  This means that we have people who share our values and our mission, who are willing to put their money into a cause they believe in, and it means that we can expand our reach, share the fruits of our labour (pun intended!).  Our volunteers pick fruit, conduct tree care workshops, keep our website updated, write grants, deliver fruit to food banks.

Our donors and members come from within our contiguous geographic community as well as from other parts of the country.   Through our CF community, we have met other organisers from Portland OR,  Bellingham WA, fielded inquiries from New Zealand, Brooklyn NY.  We have had a professional videographer volunteer to help us get our message out.

We really hope you will help us get the word out…pass on our blog link to your friends and family.  And if you are able, please donate to City Fruit.  Find a donate now button on our website. Thanks!

We’re looking for some excellent photos to use in our 2010 City Fruit Calendar. They should be related to growing, harvesting, picking, eating, and generally using urban fruit.

This is our first annual competition for our first calendar. How cool would it be to see your own photo in a calendar? And for the winning photo, the cover! We need photos of urban orchards, pests, bugs, people eating fruit, cider pressing, jam and . . . you get the idea.

Send it by Sept 1 to james@cityfruit.org.

Read the terms & rules.