The Low-Hanging Fruit Press crowdfunding campaign to purchase a community cider press  was a success.  28 people pooled their money together in 5 days to fund a cider press.  The press will not be owned by 28 people, or even one person.  The idea is that it is for the whole community to share.  If it appears that there is too much demand for it, it likely means that more cider presses are needed.

The Community Funded crowdfunding platform
In addition to the ability of a crowdfunding campaign creator offering rewards for donations, CommunityFunded.com allows organizations and individuals to offer rewards for donations as well. They call this Mega Community Collaboration (MC²).

There were three In-Kind rewards offered to the Low-Hanging Fruit Press campaign in addition to the three offered by Transition Goshen:

The campaign went quickly enough that there wasn’t enough time to fix a glitch system that caused the In-Kind rewards to not appear in the campaign until just before the campaign reached its goal.

We had a wonderful turnout Tuesday to glean apples! We thought we might get a few folks, but were thrilled to see almost 3 dozen people show up at Sonny’s!

We steered everyone to the Nisley’s for a very productive gleaning. Many carloads of apples left, but we still took quite a few apples to the Window and will be taking about 12 bushels to Miller’s Cider Press in Middlebury today to turn into cider!

We certainly had enou gh fun to warrant doing it again, so stay tuned. But you don’t need to wait for us… find a tree a fallingfruit.org and glean away! (or contact us and we can direct you to any number of places). There are plenty of apples to be picked…

National Gleaning Day is September 21-28

Help feed the hungry in your community–get out and glean!

To glean means to “gather grain or other produce left by reapers.” A rather old-fashioned sounding definition for a hip movement happening across the country, aimed at making healthy, organic produce available for all.

Learn more at nationalgleaningday.org

A few gleaning-related projects around the nation:

• SUNCOAST GLEANING PROJECT – Sarasota, FL
• Portland Fruit Tree Project – Portland, OR
• League of Urban Canners – Cambridge, MA
• Boulder Food Rescue – Boulder, CO
• Urban Youth Harvest – Oakland, CA

I got a call from David Shenk at  Elkhart County Community Corrections who suggested that people in the Elkhart County work release program might enjoy helping glean apples.

A few years ago Elkhart County Works Together organized a group of work release folks to help tend community gardens in Goshen and they really enjoyed the opportunity to work outdoors and learn how to garden.

This is a potential opportunity for many extra hands helping pick apples and creating connections.  If this opportunity interests you or have ideas of who to connect this opportunity to, let us know.

Send a note to ben@transitiongoshen.org or call 574-535-9199.

Here is the display that has been at the Goshen Farmer’s Market the past 2 weeks.

More help with it would be useful.  Let us know if you’d like to hang out there and share with folks what the project is about.