The City Fruit team has been busily harvesting throughout Seattle since cherry season started in late June, bringing in cherries, plums, apples, pears, peaches, grapes, and quince! Although fruit production was impacted by the rainy and cold spring we experienced, we’ve harvested 28,963 pounds of fruit! Based on quality and size, the fruit was distributed to food bank and meal program partners, elementary schools for snack programs, social services organizations, bakeries and apple-sauce processing partners, and cidery partners.
Most recently, fall harvests have brought in a medley of late season apples from residential trees, and community volunteers, a classroom from Eton Elementary, and several girl & boy scout troops have been supporting harvests at Longacres Racetrack Orchard in Renton. A new orchard to City Fruit this year, Longacres boasts 120 apple trees of different ages and varieties. Many of the trees have been around since the property was home to the historic Longacres horse race track, which opened in 1933 and closed in 1992. This past Sunday, October 23rd, eighteen community volunteers and thirty pack members from a cub scout troop harvested 3,672 pounds of apples! With this harvest, it brings our total pounds of fruit harvested from Longacres to 8,674! Now that’s a lot of apples! We’d like to thank Unico Properties for inviting us to harvest at Longacres, and for the many volunteers that have harvested with us this season.
As we approach the beginning of November and the holiday season, City Fruit will be sorting the apples by size and quality, with the goal to donate high quality fruit to food bank partners, and to utilize as many of the undersized or buggy apples for community cider pressing and seasonal baking events. We are excited to roll out the seasonal baking events with continuing corporate volunteering partner, Salesforce, with their group joining us on November 18th! All the pies baked at that session will be shared with partner social services organizations for use in their Thanksgiving dinner programs! We encourage anyone that would like to help us sort or bake apples this holiday season to reach out to Tiare at [email protected].
City Fruit has three cider presses available for rent — two manual and one electric grinding press! Check out our rental page to learn more and host your own neighborhood pressing party!
