Harvest Group

The Harvest Group creates links between those local people who are growing food and those who want to eat it. Enlisting volunteers, we harvest excess fruit and care for fruit trees growing on local private and public land. The abundant food that would otherwise have gone to waste is shared between the volunteers, the tree owners and community groups. The volunteers are also trained in fruit tree maintenance and return to give all trees some TLC throughout winter and spring, ensuring the continued health and vigour of these trees.

Among other fun things, the Harvest Group also runs a series of affordable seasonal workshops to train volunteers and community members in skills relevant to fruit tree growing and maintenance and natural pest control.

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It’s harvest time!

Let us know if you’ve got more fruit than you can pick or use! And if you’d like to help with the harvest.

If you’ve got fruit trees that are sighing under the weight of an abundant crop that you and all your neighbours can’t possibly eat all of, let us know about it and we will send our wonderful team of volunteers to harvest your excess. Here is how it generally works:

Let us know: by email: harvest@cch.org.au or phone: 5472 4842 when your fruit is ready to pick and what days and times we can come to harvest. **
Call out: We then send out an email to our volunteer harvest network with the harvesting date, time and place.
Harvest: You get 1/3 of the fruit, volunteer harvesters get 1/3 and the remaining fruit goes to local organisations such as childcare centres and primary schools or gets bottled.
Prune: We will endeavour to come back in winter/spring to prune and feed your trees. This is dependant on volunteer numbers vs. number of trees we harvest from. If we can’t make it back to your house, we can provide advice on how to prune.

The Perks: As a Growing Abundance volunteer (harvesting, donating fruit etc) you get FREE access to all our wonderful workshops which include fruit tree pruning, compost making, natural pest control, preserving, cider making etc.

** You can tell your fruit is ready because it’s falling off the tree/it tastes sweet/it is soft-ish and comes off the tree easily.

For more info contact Sas Allardice at Castlemaine Community House on harvest@cch.org.au or 5472 4842 or drop into the Community House at 210 Barker St, Castlemaine.

Collectively, during the 2012 season, we gathered over 6.7 tonnes of fruit from backyards around the shire in over 30 harvests across 20 sites. We attracted 185 volunteers on prunings and harvests (some more than once), fed half a tonne of windfall to local chooks and cared for over 180 trees.

If you want to get involved, please contact us by phone: (03)5472 4842 or email: harvest@cch.org.au

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