If you've got fruit hanging off the trees – or bushes – in your backyard in luscious abundance, there is a way to make sure the surplus doesn't go to waste. And you can recruit your kids, if they are 12 or older, to help harvest other fruit in the city and get it sorted and donated to programs serving low-income residents.
City Fruit started in 2008 with a simple goal: protect and harvest urban fruit trees and equitably share the fruit they produce. Founder, Gail Savina, and a small group of likeminded individuals saw that there was a lot of wasted fruit in urban areas on both public and private land. She found that fruit goes unused because people are not sure when to harvest it, how to eat it, or they are put off by damage caused by preventable disease and pests.
And so City Fruit was formed to help tree owners grow healthy fruit, provide assistance in harvesting and preserving fruit, promote the sharing of extra fruit, and work to protect urban fruit trees.
Each year, during the harvest season, which runs from July through October, City Fruit organizes volunteers to collect and distribute the fruit to local food banks, low-income summer camps and other programs designed to get nutritious food to families in need. In 2018 alone more than 46,000 pounds of useable fruit were harvested and shared among 29 organizations that serve low-income residents in Seattle.
Register Your Trees: Whether or not you need help with your fruit harvest, City Fruit wants you to register your tree with them, so they add it to their map of Seattle Fruit Trees. By knowing what grows where, they can make better strategies for caring for trees and delivering food to hungry people.
Donate Your Fruit: If you have a fruit surplus, there are three options. You can ask a City Fruit crew to come and harvest your fruit. Or you can have them drop off a u-pick harvest box for you to fill with fruit, which they will then pick up, when you are ready. Or you can take your harvest to a local organization feeding hungry people. Here's a map of organizations that accept fresh fruit.
Volunteer. Volunteer to harvest fruit, sort donations and more on their website at https://cityfruit.org or by emailing info@cityfruit.org.
