We are looking for apple and pear trees where the fruit goes to waste.

The Harvest Scrumping Project collects unwanted fruit and gives it out to eat or turns it into delicious fruit juices and chutneys. We think this is much better than it being left to rot.

In 2010, the Scrumping Project collected 3 tonnes of fruit, from trees around the city, that would have otherwise gone to waste - a pretty impressive amount! The fruit was used to make juice at public events around the city, and it was also turned into bottled juice and chutneys to raise income to keep the project going.

Brighton Permaculture Trust, which runs the project, worked with around 30 volunteers to pick the apples and pears. Although the definition of scrumping is ‘stealing fruit, especially apples, from someone else's trees’, we only collect fruit if we have the owner’s permission. And most of the fruit has come from private gardens (with permission), with one pear tree alone providing 300kg of fruit! Fruit was also collected from trees on common land.

The Scrumping projects is always looking for people to help with picking fruit. This is seasonal work so the majority of the picking effort happens in the autumn, but do sign up now if you want to be involved. For more information, to become a volunteer scrumper, or if you've got a tree in your garden that you'd like to see scrumped, please contact Brighton Permaculture Trust.