Anyone growing fruit specifically for food bank / homeless shelter / etc. donation, possibly on public lands?
If so, what are some of the highlights and low-lights? What’s worked and what have been your lessons learned?
It’s an idea I have been thinking about lately.
I always get more apples on my one tree than we can use. After bagging the excess I take them to neighbors and the food bank. In 2023 I took down about two bushels worth, about the same in '22. We’ve also harvested from friends trees and taken those down, but not lately.
Here in Seattle, my next door neighbor introduced me to this nonprofit that does the harvesting and distributing to food banks and shelters, I haven’t browsed their website much but it could have some useful information for you:
https://www.cityfruit.org/how-to-donate-fruit/
My neighbor has them harvest their Montmorency cherries every year.
Good post. I over planted seedless muscadines and I would like to see them used. Apples seem to be a good choice but I don’t know how much demand there would be for seedless muscadines. I will be checking out the possibility of donations to good causes.
all of my extra goes to food not bombs, they use it to prepare cooked meals for the homeless (or anyone hungry who comes by). I’ve volunteered with them for decades now, and this is currently how I help
fnb also usually will have location connections to gleaning groups who will come and pick too so you don’t have to
Thanks for sharing. Cool organization. There is a similar organization here. I can’t figure how they get usable fruit off of apple trees without any care, unless they just luck out. Seems that most apples here will have a coddling moth attack them if there isn’t any prevention. Now, if an organization like that did basic care of trees they harvest from, maybe a different story… but I am sure that idea gets objections from the lawyers.
That’s great. I had forgotten about FNB… good organization to donate to.
They say on that page I linked that they will only glean from apple trees that have been netted, and same for other types of fruit with pest pressure. My neighbor’s Montmorency cherries are pristine with no spray or netting, and I think most plums are here too, but definitely not the apples I’ve seen around here.
I haven’t grown specifically for a food bank but have donated excess.
Also, I introduced a food bank volunteer to a friend with excess apples. They took 10 bushels.
My only lesson is that growers need to attend to whether the fruit is picked from the tree. In my location, “drops” are OK but must be offered “for cooking only.” Of course, that seems overkill to me. While there is deer excrement everywhere on the ground, it seems that washing would be sufficient to prep apples for eating uncooked. But it helps to know the rules.
Rossen,
Our first bumper crop of peaches, turns us into food bank gifters instead of canning. We and all our friends get what they want. The rest gets boxed up for the several food pantries in our town. In 2021 we took 3 full trunk load of peaches.
Yes, my gardening group tends multiple raised garden beds on the property of a food pantry. We plan, plant, weed, and harvest 3 seasons of the year. Some of the issues are:
Tomatoes ripen when they’re ready, not just when the food pantry is open. So you either have to pick them unripe and take them in to be distributed, or you risk them rotting or bugs getting them if you wait until the pantry opens in a few days.
Some gardeners like planting more than harvesting. It helps to have a separate harvest crew for every day that the pantry is open so they can take things straight in to be distributed.
The pantry workers/volunteers aren’t always trained or interested in balancing the harvest. So if you take in 5 bags (1 of tomatoes, 1 of peppers, 1 of squash, 1 of okra, and 1 of corn) they’re likely to give each bag to a separate person. So somebody goes home with all the tomatoes but none of the other veggies. Etc.
Gardeners prefer to grow veggies rather than to wash veggies. So the items that come out of the garden are often walked into the building with dirt on them. Pantry workers and recipients don’t love that.
Gardeners enjoy growing interesting things and things that produce a lot. Many food pantry recipients don’t know what an Asian pear is, can’t make a meal out of 200 jalapeños, and aren’t familiar with edamame (or don’t have electricity to cook or water to wash).
Some garden items are supposed to be “cured” for a period of time before distribution, such as sweet potatoes, European pears, onions, and potatoes. That is a bit difficult without facilities.
Unfortunately, anything of value tends to disappear if not locked in shed. And the shed becomes a restroom if left unlocked. We had a flat tire on a 2-wheel wheelbarrow. Somebody stole the good tire off of it, two years in a row.
On the flip side, it is one of the most popular food pantries in the area because it has fresh produce. And harvesting in the morning allows the pantry to distribute the items same day so they don’t have to store or refrigerate anything. When a gardener grows something unusual, we now include a note about what it is and how to prepare it and hope that the recipient is able to read.
It’s a very rewarding project to be involved with, but it’s not without challenges. Best wishes to you if you take it on.
Hi Andrea,
It’s really great what you’ve been doing with your gardening group! Sounds like you’ve really made an impact for people in need!
I appreciate you sharing some of the challenges you’ve encountered along the way. If I go forward, I’m leaning towards fruit that can be eaten fresh, in hopes of simplifying some of those hurdles, but I am sure there are plenty of challenges, even simplified. It is a bummer when some of those unexpected things happen.
Are you also looking to grow fruit for the food pantry?
Three years ago, I planted 12 apple trees at the food pantry in hopes of supplying them with fresh fruit in the summer. Apples take several years to begin producing, so I don’t expect to have anything to show for my efforts until 2025 or 2026 at the earliest. In the meantime, I prune them to stay small enough that no one has to get on a ladder to thin or harvest the fruit; I spray them with dormant oil in the winter to address the (sometimes persistent) scale issue; and I replace 2 of them every year that a rabbit or weed whacker has killed. We have drip irrigation out there so they get water in the heat of the summer.
The varieties of apple I planted were selected to provide a long harvest over the entire summer so that the food pantry is not overwhelmed with apples all at once. A mature, full size apple tree can produce up to 2,000 apples per tree and they typically ripen in a 3-week period. That’s a LOT of apples, even for a food pantry. (This food pantry serves about 600 families per month.) To prevent food waste or overload, I planted 3 William’s Pride which should produce in early-mid July, 3 Priscilla which should produce in late July-early August, 3 Black Limbertwig which should produce in late September-early October, and 3 Stayman Winesap which should produce in October. All of these are good for fresh eating so the food pantry clients don’t have to process them in any way. They are all also very disease resistant varieties and can withstand the heat and humidity of an Arkansas summer.
As for other fruit…the food pantry has nowhere to cure European pears so I have not planted them out there even though they would definitely be welcomed by the clients. We are not sure the food pantry clients would recognize or know what to do with Asian pears, so I’ve hesitated to plant them. All other fruit trees require more care and attention than I have to offer, considering I have to drive across town to get there. If some other gardeners join the group who have an interest in fruit trees, we may expand the choices. But for now, I grow about 40 fruit trees at home where I am more available to prune and inspect and catch disease/insect issues before they get out of hand. When I harvest more than I can eat or process at home, I donate it to the food pantry. My goals at home are for very small but high-quality harvests so that I don’t need to get a booth at the farmers market to dispose of all my extra produce.
As with many gardeners, I overproduce most of what I grow every summer: tomatoes, watermelon, strawberries, blackberries, etc. All of the extra goes to the food pantry, too. Things on vines, like watermelon, cantaloupe, pumpkin, etc, are not great team players in a food pantry garden. They tend to creep into other people’s garden beds and make walkways impassable. So those are best grown at home. Strawberries need to be harvested daily in season, and I don’t go to the pantry garden daily, so I just grow those at home. Berries (blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries) need to be protected from birds if you want any sort of harvest at all, and that tends to be harder to do away from home. A few gardeners do grow strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries at the pantry garden, but I don’t think the harvest is worth the square footage of garden space. That’s just my opinion, but I generally keep it to myself. If it makes them happy to grow it and donate it, that’s fine. I’m not in charge of garden planning and all help is welcome. But just FYI, if you’re planning to grow fruit for a food pantry, you might want to take those things into consideration.
Good luck with whatever you choose to grow.
We used to grow carrots and butternut squash for the Ft Collins/Larimer County Colorado food bank about 10 yrs ago. We seeded Danver carrots as weed control between rows of winter squashes, harvesting about the time the vines were long enough to wander (1/4acre garden). Both carrots and the butternuts were great crops for the food bank - flexible harvests when we were ready and easy handling with minimal/no refrigeration requirements. Pick-up loads delivered that were distributed less than 24h later.
That food bank had refrigeration capabilities – not every food bank does. Recommend you check yours.
Worthy cause – you won’t regret whatever you can do.
Having a non-commercial orchard (15 apple trees giving lots of apples) with only 2 persons to eat everything produced i give mainly apple to my local food bank because it’s the fruit people appreciate the most here, especially Golden Russet because they can take some manipulation before being eaten and people around here are somehow fascinated by the color and appearance of them. Marc