Your trees ripe for picking? It's time for the gleaners

Did you inherit a mini-orchard when you bought your house? Or is the new baby making it impossible to find time to pick and preserve all those plums? The fruit doesn't have to go to waste and litter your lawn with bug-infested windfalls. Instead, give a call to the gleaners.

Gleaners — people who sweep through fields after a farmer has picked a crop — have a long tradition in agriculture. But food scavenging is also practiced by urban residents who see their neighbors' trees going unpicked, and know that other neighbors — the ones who shop at food banks, or are homebound — could make use of the fresh bounty.

Recently, the Esperanza Apartments for seniors in South Seattle received a gleaned fruit donation. "It went fast," says Pauline Igoe, the Dominican sister who serves as the resident manager. "We appreciate it, and it's a big help."

How it's done

The donation came from the Community Fruit Tree Harvest program, operated by the nonprofit Solid Ground in conjunction with the city-sponsored Natural Lawn & Garden Hotline. Hotline staff field calls from people who want to donate fruit from their trees. If it meets the criteria, Solid Ground sends out a scout, who determines when the fruit will be ready for harvest, and what size crew is needed, then calls the homeowner to schedule the picking.

In its third year, the program is growing. Last year, volunteers harvested trees at 40 to 50 homes, and this year the list of interested homeowners is at 125 and growing, said Gail Savina, Solid Ground's program coordinator. "That's still just a drop in the bucket to what's out there."

The volunteer cadre is also growing. Last year, "maybe eight or 10 pretty hard-core volunteers" picked 3,000 pounds of fruit, but this year, with more than 40 volunteers in the database, the project can expand.

How about your fruit?

Wondering if your fruit is a candidate for the program? Consider this criteria:

• The gleaners are picking apples, pears and plums.

• Fruit must be pesticide-free, but might be acceptable if the tree has been treated with integrated pest management (IPM) techniques. Hotline staff can answer IPM questions.

• It must be in reasonably good condition. "It doesn't have to be supermarket quality," says Savina, "but we prefer fruit that doesn't have worms or coddling moth in it. We can live with scab, or with scarring." The bottom line, she says, is "Would we eat it ourselves, and would our intended recipient be comfortable eating it?"

• It must be ripe. "Homeowners will call and say 'The plums are on the ground, come pick them,' but it's just the tree shedding the small plums, and the others are not ripe," she says.

Gleaning challenges

Ripeness, storage and timely delivery are the main roadblocks to getting backyard fruit into the hands of hungry people at food banks and meal programs, says Savina.

"Our volunteers might like to work on a Saturday, but the food banks typically aren't open until Tuesday," she says. Solid Ground doesn't have a fruit-storage warehouse, but some volunteers are donating use of their garages.

Fruit that is picked at its peak of ripeness, like plums, will rot if not used within a couple of days. If picked one evening, the delivery must be planned for the following morning.

While Solid Ground is expanding the project, such centralized gleaning may not be the ideal model to get the most use out of backyard fruit trees, Savina says. She hopes to facilitate neighborhood or community groups to start gleaning programs in their areas, and to teach owners how to tend and harvest their trees, even if they're not using the fruit themselves. "There's something about stewardship of that tree, and seeing the tree as a resource, not only for themselves, but for the community."

Bill Thorness is a freelance garden writer in Seattle: bill@thorness.com.