Local: Backyard fruit pickers help needy.
Village Harvest, a nonprofit, picks about 250,000 pounds of fresh, local fruit a year
CAMPBELL » The colors begin to pop in late December. By January, they polka dot the landscape, as oranges, lemons, tangerines and mandarins fill the backyards of every community in Silicon Valley.
“We estimate that this area alone yields about 10-40 million pounds of citrus in private properties each year,” said Craig Diserens, executive director of Village Harvest, a nonprofit that organizes volunteer fruit pickers. “We harvest about 250,000 pounds a year.”
Which is why the almost two-decades-old group is looking at ways for neighborhoods to get more engaged in their own harvesting.
Village Harvest started as an idea when the 4-H reached out to a Master Gardeners group Diserens belonged to, wanting to know how to get ahold of free fruit to make jam. A group of gardeners gathered an ad-hoc collection from trees near his West San Jose neighborhood and the harvest yielded “so much more fruit than the 4-H club needed,” Diserens said.
So the idea was born and in the first year, Diserens and a group of volunteers organized a harvest in local neighborhoods, collecting 5,000 pounds of fresh fruit.
“This led us to the idea that if we
could organize and harvest all this fruit that was otherwise just going to waste, we could help the food bank,” he explained.
But in 2001, when the volunteers were just beginning to roll, local food banks didn’t want fresh produce.
“They couldn’t give it out fast enough and they didn’t want to deal with the problem of all this rotten fruit on their shelves,” Diserens said. “They only wanted canned items.”
By 2006, as food banks saw a greater need for food, they returned to the idea of fresh fruit and Diserens was there, ready to hand it over.
“We live in such an abundant area, so much fresh, delicious fruit, essential for nutrition,” Diserens explained. “Once they could start taking the fruit we were harvesting, our idea really took off.”
And the demand took Diserens out of his profession as a development and business strategy executive at HP to become Village Harvest’s sole paid employee. Today, he manages a roster of 5,600 registered volunteers delivering 12,000 hours of service throughout San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties. On average, the organization conducts 200 harvests a year — through every fruit season — which means about four harvests a week.
Recently, a crew of 14 volunteers congregated at Vince and Karen D’Amico’s Campbell home to tackle the beast of an orange tree that dominates their front yard.
“We’ve been doing this for 10 years,” Vince said. “We’re one of the originals,
but we still have to get on the waiting list every year.
“We sign up in January,” Karen chimed in.
The D’Amicos corralled their son, David, and Village Harvest long-time volunteers Crystal and John walked the morning team through the safety talk.
Village Harvest provides the ladders, buckets, picking rigs and gloves. What they need from the volunteers is the manpower.
Which is precisely what brought out Kesha Varadarajan, 16, his little brother Hari, 10, and their dad, Sri Varadarajan. As part of his volunteer hours at Branham High School, Kesha proposed adding this program to his list. Sri Varadarajan already volunteers at Second Harvest, Sacred Heart School and Our City Forest.
“I thought it was a great
way to get outside with my kids on a Sunday,” he said of their third experience volunteering for the group. “And Hari will go wherever Kesha goes, so it was easy to get them motivated to help.”
The youngest volunteer of the day agreed.
“I like picking grapes and lemons,” Hari said. Which makes sense coming from someone not much taller than a lemon tree.
Instead of picking the tall trees on site, Hari worked with his dad on the sorting station.
As the buckets begin to come down from the trees, volunteers not up in the ladders sort the non-damaged fruit that’s good enough to go to the food banks and last a few days on the shelf. The ones with bruised rinds become juice
or go home with the volunteers.
“This tree yields two crops a year, and we can’t even begin to consume this much orange, so having this team come out to harvest is incredible,” D’Amico said. “That it’s going to the food bank makes us feel like we’re helping.”
Jessica Gutierrez, who is majoring in nutrition at San Jose State University, came out to volunteer on a recent Sunday because she believes in the power of proper nutrition.
“The value of fruit in your diet is immense,” Gutierrez said on a break from picking a tangerine tree a few blocks from the D’Amico house. “Vitamin C helps nutrients to be absorbed, lemons help the body fight bacteria and settles upset stomachs.”
Today, Village Harvest
donates the fruit volunteers pick to between 10 and 15 food agencies each year for distribution to needy people in the counties they serve.
Since 2004, Village Harvest has organized a volunteer team that operates out of the Community Services Agency, the primary food assistance organization serving residents of Mountain View, Los Altos and Los Altos Hills. The nonprofit contributes around 35,000 pounds of just-picked fruit each year for agency clients.
“In just five years, we’ve seen our numbers climb dramatically,” said Tom Myers, executive director of Community Services Agency. “Five years ago we were feeding 3,000 people a year, this year we’ll feed 10,000.”
Myers said when people can’t afford to pay their rents, their diet suffers.
“It’s so much easier to live on the dollar menus at fast food restaurants,” Myers said. “Which is why when we can get fresh fruit to our clients, it makes all the difference in the world.”
Myers said his agency also depends on farmers markets for fresh produce, but it’s the fresh fruit from Village Harvest that is now essential to the agency’s clients.
Despite all the good will Village Harvest yields, Diserens is quick to point out that homeowners need not wait for their teams to show up and harvest.
“Now that food banks will take produce from backyards, we really want to evolve into an organization that finds solutions for neighborhoods to get proactive in their own harvests,” Diserens explained.
They are looking at a program modeled on the neighborhood recycling bins that are now a regular part of weekly collections.
“We have 200 calls for fruit offers and we can only get to 40 of those,” Diserens said. “So as we grow, we have to engage the community in their own fruit collection.”
The recent Sunday harvest in Campbell did exactly what Diserens is hoping will happen more often: Neighbors who saw the crew arrive at the D’Amico’s home picked from their own backyards and delivered their crops to the food bank bins set up on the sidewalk. They contributed 474 pounds to the 2,034 pounds of oranges, tangerines, and lemons harvested from four homes.
To volunteer, go to villageharvest.org or call 888-FRUIT-411.