Harvesting the 'City of (fruit) Trees'
Sacramento is nicknamed the "City of Trees" for a reason. Even in its most urban core, the city is filled with fruit trees.
So what happens when those trees produce more fruit than the owners can harvest, let alone eat? One option is to let Harvest Sacramento take care of it. This year alone, the group has collected more than 13,000 pounds of fruit from the Sacramento area, all of which goes to the Sacramento Food Bank.
Harvest Sacramento organized a Midtown Fruit Harvest on Saturday in which 25 community volunteers helped pick more than 1,300 pounds of citrus for the food bank. In just three hours, the group collected grapefruit, oranges, lemons and kumquats from nine houses in the grid.
The group was inspired by an East Sacramento couple, Mary McGrath and Robin Aurelius, who organized a grass-roots effort to harvest unwanted oranges from trees in the McKinley Park area. After that group delivered more than 3,000 pounds of citrus to the Sacramento Food Bank in early 2009, Soil Born Farms joined in and took a lead role in increasing community involvement.
"We have big white bins to put the fruit in, and the food bank picks them up and weighs them," said Randy Stannard, a food access coordinator at Soil Born Farms. "The giver gets a receipt and a tax write-off for about $1 per pound."