We kicked off of our picking and preserving workshop series with a bountiful serviceberry pick with our friends at Na-Me-Res and The Stop Community Food Centre! 

Before heading out for the pick, we took a tree tour through Wychwood Barns Park, exploring various fruit trees and sharing knowledge about fruit identification, ripening, and picking methods with the workshop participants. We continued walking beyond the park to a nearby residential street where we met our large tree covered in deep red serviceberries. Unpacking our buckets and setting up our ladders, we got to picking!

Careful not to burst or squish the serviceberries, we carefully picked from the tree’s branches and dropped them into the buckets.

While on the property, some of the picking team began to remove the stems as the first step of fruit processing for our preserving workshop.

Wrapping up on site, we weighed the total harvest and were happy to see a whopping 14lbs on the scale! 

We headed back to The Stop’s kitchen at Artscape Wychwood Barns, where we washed and removed the stems from the remainder of the serviceberries before packing them in freezer bags. We can’t wait to get creative with the harvest during the preserving part of our workshop series later in July!

A special thank you to the folks of Na-Me-Res and The Stop Community Food Centre for their hard work, as well as Patagonia Toronto and TD Friends of the Environment Foundation for making this workshop series possible!