On being Noted, fruit, and the Historic Iron Bridge

Take note, I've been noted. Traffic to my little blog has spiked over the last 24 hours to over 5000 hits. That's a lot. Hello world.

Weird.

Apples
It seems the apples have come a bit earlier this year. On Friday, Liza and I are going to ride the apple circuit and collect from my favorite mostly-public-space fruit trees.

It would be cool to have an interactive map that shows where the good mostly-public fruit is around town. The way it would have to work would be to have a map that is not visible until a user provides at least one good source for fruit. The hard part is verifying the source of fruit a user submits. There's a scale issue there.



This is a small haul from one of my favorites last year. Lunch: Natural Start.
In any case, there are hundreds of apple trees that are fit for picking in this area. Any cyclist that keeps an eye out is sure to see many apple trees. What I've found in the last couple years are two or three great apple trees: crisp, sweet, non-mealy, not wormy. The money trees are pear (I know of one that is mostly public and many that are private) and apricot (same deal there). Plums are interesting, but not money.

So, we'll pick on Friday and on Saturday, we'll make apple sauce and apple butter. You can throw any old apple into sauce or butter as long as you lean towards the green/tart for the majority.

Iron Bridge

My favorite project looks to be complete next Summer. It's the key piece of the East Sprague\Chief Gary connection and will make getting to the new Pedals2People space (1802 E Sprague) way easier from downtown.

From our esteemed bike/ped coordinator, Grant Wencel:

"The funding we received from the WA State Recreation and Conservation Office includes design and construction.($530,000). The detailed design work will begin this fall/winter by outside consultants, with construction planned for 2010."