OTTAWA’S HARVEST HIDDEN
Group organizes volunteers to gather fruits and nuts that would otherwise go to waste
When Karen Keskinen looked out at her big backyard last summer, the bounty bothered her. “It has this huge backyard and a pergola that was just covered with Concord grapes,” says Keskinen, who rents her home in Old Ottawa South. “I’d go out and pick some of them, but I’m a party of one — I couldn’t begin to use them all. My neighbours didn’t want them and the owner, who now lives in a seniors’ home, couldn’t use them.”
After some searching around on the Internet, she found Hidden Harvest Ottawa, a new group dedicated to picking and sharing fruits and nuts that would otherwise go to waste.
Hidden Harvest contacted a team of volunteers, some of whom arrived on their bicycles, and 80 pounds (36 kg) of grapes were picked within an hour. Most of the grapes were delivered to the Centretown Emergency Food Centre.
“It was such a treat for our clients,” says Kerry Kaiser, co-ordinator of the centre which has seen a 20-per-cent increase in need over the past 18 months, including many more families with young children. “Grapes are an expensive luxury we would never buy and they could never afford. They were just the best thing in the world.”
For her part, Keskinen says she was “just charmed” by the volunteers and the whole concept of the Hidden Harvest organization, which is less than a year old.
“It was just an extraordinary feeling to have this fruit, that would have died on the vine, providing nutrient-rich, sunshine-filled food to people who need it.”
One basket of grapes was reserved for the home’s owner. Keskinen says that when she brought the grapes to him, and explained how the rest were used, “he almost teared up. It meant a lot to him.”
Hidden Harvest Ottawa is less than a year old, but its mandate resonates with time-honoured traditions as well as similar groups that have sprang up across Canada and Europe.
“There’s an innate human drive to not want to waste food,” says Katrina Siks, 31, who came up with the idea for starting the Ottawa group with Jason Garlough, 35, over a glass of fresh-pressed cider made from windfall apples at a friend’s cottage.
Garlough says that somewhere along the line, “we’ve got to the point where we recognize an apple tree, or even a black walnut, but we no longer see it as food.”
Garlough, who used to sit on the City of Ottawa’s forest and green space advisory committee, said they’d get monthly reports about fallen apples and nuts — as problems.
“When fruit falls on a sidewalk, or someone else’s lawn, it can be a bit of a liability,” says Garlough. “Similarly, nuts are hard and can cause problems on walkways. The solution was to cut the trees down.”
At the same time, as a member of the board of Ottawa-area group Just Food, Garlough was hearing about how food banks were facing unprecedented demand — 48,000 people go to an Ottawa-area food bank each month — at the same time as food prices are rising.
“So on one side, we’ve got all the excess fruit, while on the other, we have this need,” says Garlough.
He and Siks quit their day jobs — she with a sustainable cycle-touring company and he in software consulting for the federal government — and took pay cuts to start Hidden Harvest Ottawa, to try to make more sense of the equation.
Garlough says they’ve already made a list of more than 4,000 unharvested fruit- and nut-bearing trees on City of Ottawa property alone, and that represents just onefifth of all the City-owned land.
“That’s a lot of potential,” he says. “An average orchard in Eastern Ontario is just 1,800 trees.”
And those 4,000 trees don’t take into account trees on National Capital Commission land or ones like Keskinen’s, on private property.
“We’re starting small — we did 10 harvests last fall,” says Siks. In all, the group collected about 500 pounds (227 kg) of fruit and nuts, with more than half going to food banks. “But the real point,” she says, “is to create a culture that supports fruit-bearing trees.”
Siks and Garlough say that means everything from “living in a city where a child knows where the nearest apple tree is” to replacing some of the huge number of trees that will be lost due to the Emerald Ash Borer with ones that bear fruit.
And lest you think they’ve confused our climate with Niagara’s, Siks and Garlough will list more than a dozen types of trees that are already thriving in the Ottawa area that bear edible fruit and nuts — everything from mulberries and serviceberries to black walnuts, ginkgo trees and even Korean pines (which bear the pine nuts used in cooking).
As they started setting up last spring, Garlough and Siks studied similar groups across Canada and around the world.
“We’re far behind Europe,” says Garlough. “Groups like Abundance Network in the U.K. are doing some amazing work. Towns in England have adopted their own cultivars and they’re proud of them. It would be like Hintonburg having its own cultivar of apple.”
They say that the five-year-old Toronto group Not Far from the Tree — which picked 12,512 pounds (5,675 kg) of fruit and nuts in 2012 — is a great example, but they plan to operate somewhat differently.
“Not Far from the Tree is a nonprofit,” says Garlough, “which is great, but it means that they depend on grants and donations, and you can run into donor fatigue.”
Hidden Harvest aims to be selfsufficient within three years, building in revenue streams through such measures as tree sales, workshops on making preserves and possibly even selling products. “Why not a Hidden Harvest jam?” Garlough asks.
Already last fall, they put on a canning workshop, with some of the participants doing everything from picking the grapes, to making jam (see the recipe below) and taking it to the local Harvest Noir event.
“It’s not just about getting the work done,” says Siks. “We also want it to be a celebration of the local harvest.”
For her part, Keskinen says she was so impressed with the Hidden Harvest concept, she has now involved students in the public relations class she teaches at Carleton University in making a communications plan.
“We’re trying to loop in with local chefs and commercial kitchens,” says Keskinen. “I sense from the enthusiasm in fourth-year university students that they are seeing this as a very food-friendly city. Gleaning really is an old-fashioned term that’s new again. It’s taking the concept of local food to a new level.”