The London Fruit Harvest

The London Fruit Harvest is an idea to change the abundance of unpicked fruit in London by training local fruit harvesters and growing a network of community-led picking groups that rescue fruit, share it, and celebrate the city’s edible abundance.

London is an Orchard

Every autumn, London quietly produces an orchard’s worth of fruit, apples leaning over garden fences, pears heavy on street-side trees, plums ripening in overlooked corners. Too much of it drops, bruises, and disappears into the compost heap of missed opportunity.

In 2025 we helped pick, juice, and donate tons of fruit to schools, food banks and communities in North West London, we need you to help us do this across London!

We are aiming to build new community harvesting groups across the city, or to help existing community groups to add fruit harvesting to what they already do. We need voluntary coordinators to lead on this in their local community.

Become a fruit harvester coordinator

At the heart of it are three key roles for each coordinator:

Be proactive – find the people, find the trees, make the connections
Build something sustainable – develop shared leadership, keep it safe, keep it going
Coordinate the picks – the practical admin that turns good intentions into full crates

Fill out your details below to join our webinar and find out about becoming a coordinator.

Right now there are around seven fruit harvesting groups in London. Three larger groups in Chiswick, Kensal to Kilburn, and Wimbledon harvested over 7 tonnes this season and involved up to 200 people. Harvesting groups work best when they are truly local, typically covering an area of about 1.5 miles across. A group might harvest three or four times during the six-week season, or go out dozens of times, saving anywhere from 200 kg to 3 tonnes of apples, pears, plums, quince and more.

We will provide you with support including training, access to funding and materials for your group, mentoring and advice!

If you’ve ever looked at a tree loaded with fruit and thought, “someone should do something about that”, this is that something.

Sign up to our email updates for future Fruit Harvest Leader Training.

Award-winning film about the

Kensal to Kilburn Fruit Harvesters

Lovely 4 minute film about by Jonathan Goldberg. Winner of Environmental film of the year 2013 awarded at Royal Geographic Society

Over 100 harvesters and tree owners contribute each year. The Kensal to Kilburn Fruit Harvesters make juice to sell at Queen’s Park Day (when that can happen), have a dehydrator for members to borrow, run jam making workshops, Parlour restaurant kindly makes jam for us, we’ve harvested with children’s nurseries, lend a fruit picking tool through the library on Salusbury Road and have planted 40 fruit trees on a local estate and elsewhere.

Fruit HArvest Leader training

Guide to: starting a Fruit Harvesting Group

There are lots of ways to start a group and keep it running long-term. We’ve built our approach around our experience running the Kensal to Kilburn Fruit Harvesters, as well as conversations with other groups.

Download

Reasources

Flyer template

Editable flyer created in Powerpoint format

Download

Flyer template

Editable Canva Template

Open

Food Growing Organisations

Searching for support or inspiration? These organisations are a great place to begin.

Good to Grow UK

Good to Grow UK Good to Grow (the new name for the Big Dig) is an online platform to support food growing in the UK, run by Sustain. The Good to Grow Network is all about getting people involved in their local