Community harvesting [View All]

[politicat]

DH and I noticed that there are a ton of apple trees in our community, and no one ever picks the trees - they don't spray them, they don't do anything with them but complain that they apples are falling and rotting on the ground. Now maybe I just grew up with a strange family (farmers, so we're awfully thrifty) but I can't ever remember seeing fruit left to rot like this. So last weekend, I made up a flyer asking for permission from the tree owners to pick their trees, and put them on front doors, with my phone number, and we got 25 calls, all begging us to come and pick their trees, PLEASE!

Well... I couldn't handle that much (I was expecting one or two to return a call) so I passed the names, addresses and numbers on to a friend who works for LDS social services up here (she's great - liberal, compassionate, and utterly faithful, but her mission in life is not to pop as many babies as she can but to serve the poor. Thus, her career path. She calls herself a Mormon nun.) She got several young men and women (she has a corp of 18-19 year old lads and girls who are between graduating from high school and going on their missions and thus can be reliably counted on to be available at her call) to go pick those trees. Then I called the homeowners back and told them that young people would be coming and basically got a lot of happy noise back. (That felt good.) When I drove past the trees yesterday, all of them were pretty much clean, and even better, the groundfalls had been picked up and either thrown away or composted.

My friend just left, after bringing me a single #10 can of the cinnamon apple slices that those kids turned out this week. She knew I'd been canning my own, in glass, but wanted to share what I'd started. They are excellent, and the kids canned nearly 1000 pounds of apples this week, of which about 75% will be going to the local food bank and the others will be put into Thanksgiving and Christmas baskets supplied by the county.

My friend also decided that this was excellent work for her small crew, and they enjoyed the canning and cooking, so she managed to find tomatoes and zucchini and is going to put them to work doing something similar next week. All of the produce she's using is donated, stuff that would otherwise either landfill or just rot on the vine. (She left here with about 40 pounds of zukes, thanks to the garden that will not quit.)

The more I look at this, the happier I'm feeling. While the Mormons and I have serious disagreements about many things, this activity is nothing but good, and put several people on the road to learning a skill that they wouldn't have gotten otherwise. And it saved at least one otherwise blameless tree from the axe (one of the homeowners told me that she was so frustrated with her tree last weekend - it had dented her car - that she was about to have it removed entirely. Now that she and my social services friend have connected directly, the tree gets to stay!).

Not bad for a few hours' work and some thought.

I just thought I'd share this idea, and hope to encourage others to look for ways to make use of the urban fruit trees that so often go to waste.