Pick variety of delicious fruits from your garden
It has been 15 years since Urban Harvest started its annual fruit tree sale. Since that time, thousands of fruit trees from that sale have been planted in metro Houston yards. In addition to the huge Urban Harvest sale, there are five or six other large sales every year, and big box stores carry a nice selection of citrus trees. In addition to this, many local nurseries carry good varieties of fruit trees, year round.
Today, almost any street you walk or drive has fruit trees growing in back and front yards. My question is, “what do people do with the abundance of fruit that they can’t eat themselves?” For instance, we have 23 citrus trees that produce thousands of oranges, tangerines, lemons and grapefruit; and jujubes, avocados, pomegranates, figs and persimmons that all produce way more than we can eat, juice, freeze and dehydrate. We have friends who are in the same situation.
We eat all we can, and then give to neighbors, friends, relatives, food pantries and Plant It Forward Farms farmers to include in their farm shares to customers. Harvesting is a lot of work that takes a lot of time.
I met a woman last week who would like someone to come harvest and use the excess citrus fruit from her trees. I have heard this over and over again from people who didn’t realize that an orange or tangerine tree can produce many hundreds of fruit each year, and multiply that times a few trees, and all of the sudden people are hunting for someone to help them harvest. In order to have the many fruit and flavors that we want, we plant many fruit trees, and will continue to add trees, but ethically it seems excess needs to be used.
Unfortunately, on my walks, I often see fruit trees laden with unharvested, ripe fruit; and that means that there is food going to waste. I have thought about starting an organization to harvest this fruit. It would be a service to the owner of the trees, because surely they don’t want their fruit to be wasted, when there are many people hungry, and literally hundreds of food pantries in metro Houston that would be delighted to be able to offer their clientele fresh nutritious fruit. There has been one effort to do this already, but I don’t know how successful it has been, but certainly one effort could not possibly handle the entire city, or even a major neighborhood.
I’m looking for ideas, from you. Is it a matter of letting homeowners know where the local food pantries are? Is it a matter of asking neighbors or friends to help those who are not able to harvest everything from their trees? What are solutions to all the unused fruit that hangs from trees until it rots, mainly because the homeowner is unable to harvest or has harvested all they can use, or because the fruit is so high on the trees that they can’t get to it? I would like to take my ladder and fruit pole picker to all those houses, and make hundreds of trips to food pantries, but just like the homeowner, the work seems too much.
It would be wise to get something started to get the extra fruit to people who want and need it.