Community harvesting

[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.

[NMDemDist2]

1. brilliant! n/t

[yellerpup]

2. What an inspiring story, politicat

You have set a great example of what can be accomplished by one person thinking and acting. Look what you started! Banking a half a ton of apples in the food bank deserves a big hand! :applause: :applause: :applause: :woohoo: :applause: :applause: :loveya:

[TygrBright]

3. Be-YOND cool....

Thanks, Politicat! Both for getting this great community thang going and for sharing the story.

admiringly,
Bright

[Duer 157099]

4. I often see ads for this sort of thing on Craigslist

People advertising free fruit/veggies to whoever will come pick it -- or to pick up grounded fruit for livestock etc.

See if there is such a craigslist for your local area and have them put an ad in the "Free" section or the "Wanted" section (or both).

It's cool that you got that ball rolling though!! I also can't stand seeing fruit falling from trees and just sitting on the ground.

[Gormy Cuss]

5. Holy cow. What a great idea.

I'm stunned that they are so many people with the trees who hadn't just picked them and brought the apples to a food bank. The best part of the story is the anecdote of the owner who saw the tree as a nuisance and now recognizes it as a resource.

[grasswire]

6. in walks around my neighborhood...

...I've seen many, many trees bending over with the weight of apples, pears, figs, etc. this year, with fruit spilling onto the ground. So I got in touch with a friend who works at the regional food bank and he said that some churches have "gleaners" who will go out to pick fruit for the food bank. He asked me to contact homes where fruit might be available, and I have done so. I just hate to see fruit just go to waste. And I made a few friends, including an elderly man named Al who grows zillions of tomatoes and who somehow always manages to bump into my chest when he's trying to hand me a pot of basil or some veggies. I gotta steer clear of him.

[politicat]

7. I've got one of those!

Maybe I'm weird. I guess I just don't mind him taking his cheap thrill. (There's a part of me that's rather astonished that Mr. X can still muster the testosterone to want to caress my hip every time he is in my vicinity.) Having worked cocktail and other service jobs, the flattering and kind of pathetic surreptitious stroke bothers me a LOT less than the abusive leers, propositions for various indecencies, and the general braggarting that just makes me, a radical feminist, want to dispense with 95% of the XY carriers on the planet.

And besides, I hope to continue to incite dirty old men to lascivious thoughts through the next half century, so getting an early start doesn't phase me much. I intentionally married an ADOM (Apprentice Dirty Old Man); I can't really complain when others engage in behavior I like now and hope to continue to condone.