A community food reclamation and sharing initiative has begun its second season on Salt Spring, establishing a new pillar program that hopes to “rescue” excess fruit from island trees.
“The harvesting has begun!” laughed Nick Jones, co-leader of Salt Spring Island Farmland Trust’s (SSIFT) Grow Local initiative. “We’ve mostly been working with plums so far. There are a lot!”
Grow Local has a central goal of improving the community’s connections to local food and the land, and for Jones and co-leader Polly Orr the focus lately has been on Salt Spring’s Local Food Share program, consisting of the popular Sunday food exchange at The Root, a hosted produce drop-off effort, and now the Fruit Harvest.
“There is so much fruit that is grown on this island, and a lot of the pear, apple and plum trees from these heritage orchards don’t get fully harvested,” said Jones. “Some of these trees are so abundant, and the owners either don’t have time or the energy.”
SSIFT designed the program around volunteers interested in helping harvest, and coordinates with landholders interested in having their trees harvested.
“Then we go do it,” said Jones. “We pick all the fruits, in a safe, responsible way. There’s training so people know how to handle trees and pick properly.”
The harvest is then shared — a third goes to the volunteer pickers, a third to the landowners and the remainder to community partners like Island Community Services (ICS), which runs the food bank, hamper program and community fridges. Jones said often the landowner doesn’t need or want their third, which adds more to what’s available for food programs. Jones said ICS ensures it gets distributed to people on the island who could use extra produce in their life.
“And we’ve booked a number of Sundays at the commercial kitchen at The Root,” said Jones. “So our volunteers will be dehydrating, canning, juicing or turning things into apple pies.”
With apologies for the pun, the Fruit Harvest program grew organically from last season’s pilot program; the community members involved were helpfully offering suggestions throughout, Jones said.
“We were finding out what they wanted to see, what was missing, what needs weren’t being met,” said Jones. “What emerged from the conversations was the realization there was so much fruit people wanted to make sure was used. So we worked hard over the winter.”
That effort involved acquiring funding — Jones credited helpful sponsorships from the Victoria Foundation and Island Savings, through their community endowment fund — as well as making connections with a volunteer computer programmer who built the online logistics software to organize the harvests.
Notably, Jones said, SSIFT is also now a co-steward of the orchard at the oceanfront Bloom Castle by the Sea property, recently donated to Royal Roads University and representing some 100 fruit trees — and the potential for as much as 6,000 pounds of harvested fruit every year.
“And we’ve been blessed with some amazing people stepping forward,” said Jones, “including the team at SSIFT, who are all pitching in, from marketing to making sure apples get into the walk-in cooler.”
Jones said the current group of about 15 to 20 volunteer harvesters would love to grow; the summer apples are beginning to come in, and people have been reaching out about harvests in September and October. And anyone with more produce than they can handle should reach out as well.
“We would love to hear from people, whether you have a tree that could be harvested or a garden that’s too abundant and you don’t want that food to go to waste,” said Jones.
To register your trees, or volunteer to help harvest, visit ssifarmlandtrust.org/foodshare.