Each year, thousands of fruit trees across Leeds go unpicked or unused because their owners can’t harvest them or there is too much fruit to use at one time. Leeds Urban Harvest is a volunteer run community project that lends picking and processing equipment to groups to make juice from their excess apples. Because there are more apples than people to juice them we also press and make use of surplus fruit donated by people, which would otherwise go to waste. 

Leeds Urban Harvest started in 2009 as a grassroots group collecting and foraging fruit from Leeds gardens and public spaces. As we built up a bank of fruit picking and processing equipment we started lending it out to community groups to do their own picking and processing. We think that the more fruit that gets harvested and used the better!

In 2017 we started to scale-up the amount of apple processing we do to make use of more surplus fruit (mostly apples and pears) so we can become a more stable social enterprise. We sell the pasteurised juice and craft cider we make and invest the income to make the project sustainable and affordable.