If you’ve been promising yourself that this is the year you’ll make passata, it is not too late, but it almost is. There’s one more week to get your tomatoes for Crowdsaucing Day and sauce it up like they do at the Fitzroy Community Food Centre (that’s them above and yes, they’re hosting a Crowdsaucing if you’d like to go). You can find all the public saucing events on our Sauce Host Map. And although Crowdsaucing Day is on 30th of April we’ve set the cut-off date to buy your saucing tomatoes as midnight Sunday 24th April. That’s one week away and they’re going fast.
There’s been some questions about Crowdsaucing Day and whether you can just buy a few boxes of tomatoes and sauce them at home. The answer is “Yes, absolutely” You can be a “self-saucer” or you can invite a few family and friends to your private saucing or if you’re that way inclined you can open up your saucing day to the whole community. It’s up to you.
Want to be part of Crowdsaucing Day? Just do these 3 to 4 things:
1. Sign up on the Crowdsaucing website
2. If you are hosting a private or public saucing and want to invite people then “Create a Crowdsaucing Event” (if you’re not just go to step 3).
3. Go buy your tomatoes (click on the “Buy Tomatoes” button).
4. Then choose to either have your tomatoes delivered to a Crowdsaucing event (see the Sauce Host Map) or to your home.
It doesn’t matter if you sauce solo or with half the neighbourhood, the key thing about Crowdsaucing Day is that we’re making sauce in our own community with tomatoes grown by our own farmers – like AusVeg Young Farmer of the Year in 2014 Nathan Free (that’s him there growing the 5 tonnes of organic tomatoes we’re saucing this year).
Nathan, who was the first organic farmer to win the young farmer of the year award, started growing vegetables when he was 15. He first sold his produce from a roadside stall. Today he’s managing all the fruit and vegetable production on his family’s Lake Boga farm aka Alkira Organics.
Nathan’s a fifth generation farmer and through events like Crowdsaucing we want to play a part in making sure Nathan Free’s children might also get a guernsey at growing our food (if that’s what they’re into!).
Oh and lastly, if you’re passionate about passata-making but need a bit of direction, Crowdsaucing force-of-nature Monique Miller, has put together a comprehensive resource page of sauce-making info and videos, she’s even created an easy to use label template you can use on a home printer.
