Don't let it rot. Give it away.

Gleaning advice from the Portland Fruit Tree Project's director

Spotted 3 blocks from my house. Of course I took some.

As my walks around the neighborhood have demonstrated, Portland has officially entered peak gleaning season, the season of fruit rotting on sidewalks, spontaneous giveaways on street corners, and the race to collect, preserve, and share as much produce as possible. 

I emailed Heather Keisler Fornes, executive director of the Portland Fruit Tree Project, to ask for her thoughts on how to approach gleaning season. As I learned more about the mind-bending variety of projects that Heather and her tiny crew take on, I decided to just share our conversation. (Also, the project I was planning to write about just exploded, so I have to do one more test run.)

This 18-year-old organization collects massive amounts of fruit, primarily from privately owned trees, and distributes it to food pantries and other organizations serving food-insecure Portlanders. This month, Portland Fruit Tree Project also launched a new program that sends you texts letting you know when certain kinds of fruits are ready to glean – and what to do with them. The posts are great! Sign up.

Jonathan Kauffman: We're entering gleaning season, and you know that better than anybody else in town. What's the typical situation that people with too much fruit find themselves in? 

Heather Keisler Fornes: There's a few common scenarios: One is that people plant trees, but then they can no longer manage what they're dealing with. Others have moved into a property that has a fruit tree, and they don't really like that fruit. My neighbor is a great example. She’s like, “I want about six persimmons a year, but this tree produces 600 pounds of persimmons a year.” 

Based on the age of fruit trees you're seeing, was there some Golden Era where Portlanders went hog-wild planting a bunch of trees? 

It's constant. Portlanders love, love, love fruit trees. I'm out in East Portland, and this was orchard space. We were agricultural before we were urban, so there's a lot of legacy trees. Now everybody who wants to homestead – which is basically every Portlander – has planted at least one fruit tree, and it's probably weird. Peaches in this climate? Why not? Fourteen citrus trees?  Absolutely. Those are all examples from my yard. 

Does the fruit you collect mostly go to organizations like food pantries, which pass it out fresh, or does it go to organizations that cook it? 

We work with a lot of different strategies, because people have planted lots of things. When I started at Portland Fruit Tree Project, persimmons were the clutch problem. They grow great in our climate, so Friends of Trees has planted a million of them. But the white people our partner food banks had traditionally been serving didn't know what to do with them. So we connected with a food pantry that serves hundreds of Asian American elders, and now we're able to move all our persimmons. 

We also get a bunch of fruit that’s not in great shape. Every cherry has fruit flies, but we try hard not to bring things that aren't beautiful, because people who don't forage for fun don’t know how many bugs they eat. And we don't want to make it obvious. 

We work with organizations that cook the fruit, or we're going to start doing some of our own cooking and preservation. We'll be doing at least four canning workshops, using fruit we have harvested and frozen. People will bring some home, but the rest will go to partner organizations, or we'll try to sell it at craft fairs. We have a dream of trying out some vinegars and we’re going to do a cider pressing event. 

All of this stuff is edible. It just requires a little bit of hustle. 

Are most of the trees you're dealing with in people's yards, or are there a lot of street trees? 

Theoretically, there are no fruit trees as street trees because it’s not approved. But obviously there are a ton. If the homeowner associated with that street tree asks us to come harvest it, we’ll do it. But we only do things where we're invited. We're not just wandering around, getting ourselves into trouble, picking things that we're not supposed to pick. We're also not allowed to forage in parks. 

Do you have any recommendations for people like me who are interested in gleaning from street trees?

Our typical suggestions are to connect with the likely homeowner associated with the tree first, which is both polite and a good way to meet a neighbor, then if there is no one associated with it, to pick in a responsible way, and be ready to say sorry if someone was stewarding the tree. 

Can you tell me a little bit about your free fridge drop-off program? What’s acceptable versus what’s not? 

We have a guide for that on the website. We just ask people to use basic common sense. If it’s gross and you're not gonna eat it, please don't donate it to us. That's giving us your compost. When you fill out a little form, which says this is what I dropped off, we can provide a donation receipt, but we also get a little blip on our side that says, hey, there’s more fruit in the fridge. 

Are there other ways that you’d like to encourage people to interact with you? 

We’re now sending out texts that tell you what fruits are ripe now (ed note: they’re great, so sign up at the bottom of the organization’s home page). And if you follow the link from the text it goes to a blog post with cooking strategies. On Instagram, we post all the things that we're doing. And getting harvest services – people who hire us to do tree care for them – is really helpful for us, and makes fruit across the city better. 

Are there fruits that you want to see more of? 

Anything that's on the early end or the late end of the harvesting season. Early plums and cherries are great, or late persimmons and olives, that kind of thing. We're already hammered during July and August with apples and pears. 

Honestly, there's so much need. Food organizations are really struggling. They're seeing 30% increases in demand, year over year, and now that pandemic funding is over, the money has dried up. Being able to provide free, high-quality food for these organizations is really important.