Ealing Abundance Project

West Ealing Neighbours started its Abundance project in 2007. Our starting point was very simple: to stop local fruit going to waste. In our first year all we did was pick and distribute fruit from one local apple tree. Since then the project has developed each year so that in 2009 we picked and gave away some 25 kilos of eating apples and made and sold over 130 jars of jams, chutneys and sauces.

It's clear that as soon as we talk to people about Abundance they instantly 'get' the idea and really like it. The idea of eating local produce has very wide appeal. Now we're planning our next steps in developing Abundance and we've joined with Ealing Transition in a project to start to map local fruit trees. It seems fairly obvious that we need to know what we have available first. We.ll put the location of fruit trees on public land on a map on our website (www.westealingneighbours.org.uk). With residents willing to share or let us have fruit from trees on their own land, we'll log that information for use by project members only.

We're looking for volunteers to help us with the mapping, fruit picking, cooking and so on. For more information about Abundance and how to volunteer visit our Abundance blog at http://westealingabundancew13.wordpress.com/about/.