Jane Arrowsmith turns people’s forgotten fruit into gold – or at least delicious food. Photo: Johannes Frandsen.
July isn’t only the most classical holiday month in Sweden, it is also the time of the year when people’s gardens start to explode with fruits and vegetables.
It might sound odd, but for many this seems to be an annual surprise.
When holidays are planned, very few take into account that their own homes will turn into food-producing factories. Others just don’t have the time or energy to take care of harvests from plants and trees that were probably already there when they moved in.
So while Swedish gardens are bursting with tons of apples, pears, plums, currants and gooseberries – a lot of it unfortunately just rots away.
Liquid apple for darker days. Photo: Johannes Frandsen.
When Jane Arrowsmith, who lives in the western part of Stockholm, noticed this, she felt something had to be done.
She started by letting her friends on Facebook know that she could harvest their fruit and give back 20–25 percent of it in the form of jam, juice and other refined products. The rest of it, Jane and her family eat themselves or sell at local markets.
Soon enough people started to contact Jane themselves. It is hard to know how much fruit Jane takes care of, but she knows that last year more than 300 kilo of apples went to juice-making, and that was just a small part of the harvest.
