On Sharing: fruit trees & farm goods

Seeing that in a month or two, I'll be in the thick of winter and forgetting what I like about living here, I thought I'd share about two organizations that blessed me this summer.   I need to relish these Prairie vs. BC benefits, as soon I'll be forgetting that there are any at all!

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One of the highlights of my summer was being a picker through Fruit Share Manitoba - a wonderful volunteer-run organization.*  It connects fruit owners who don't want all of their goods to volunteers in the city who'd be happy to have some of it.  By signing up as a volunteer, I received weekly emails notifying of the fruit available, addresses, times and number of people needed for each pick.  The home owner can choose to keep 1/3 of the pick (most didn't), 1/3 goes to a charity we chose and the pickers shared the remaining.  Even sharing a third often equalled two full laundry baskets.

I loved that it helped me justify buying a ladder and a large stock pot, as I've wanted both for years. :)

The younger two enjoyed exploring backyards - with grass - or watching DVDs.

A, however, was in her glory and a great picker.  I so enjoyed getting a few outings one-on-one with her.  We discovered that apple picking put my old baby carrier (too unfashionable for anyone to have taken as a hand-me-down) to super great use.

Only able to choose one pick each week, volunteers lucked out if they responded first to the emails.  More rare picks - rhubarb, grapes, plums or pears - were snatched up the moment they were posted.  Apples, however, started to come into abundance throughout the city in August.  Sometimes, there just weren't enough pickers.  I felt a rather compulsive need to let none go to waste, partly as I purely enjoyed getting to climb trees, meet interesting people and hang out in nicer back yards than mine!  I also discovered the thrill of filling my freezer with sliced apples ready for pie, having bags of dehydrated snacks waiting for the kids and seeing a pantry with jars of canned applesauce.  I'm rather slow figuring out this aspect of domestic life. :)

My attempts on the left to make apple cider vinegar - a total bomb.
 Turned out it was a fruit fly haven and super gross to dispose of weeks later.  More cheesecloth required next year?

While impressed with the literal fruits of my labour - 32 large mason jars and a milk crate of applesauce in the freezer - S had to put his foot down by the end of the summer.  NO MORE APPLES!  It was hard to let the opportunity pass.  What helped wrap it up, aside from S's chiding, was getting tricked by a pear pick in early September.  I was excited that I was one of two to go harvest pears, only to discover when A and I arrived that the pear tree had already been picked.  Super tall, the owner of the house had gotten all she could with her super-duper length ladder.  There were pockets of them at the top, so the brave picker I was with climbed into the limbs 25 feet up.  He reached what he could, then we decided he'd shake the tree and we'd catch the drops a tarp.  All that, and we got just a grocery bag each.  The homeowner admitted that she has a huge crab apple tree and had posted it over the past couple of weeks on Fruitshare, but no one had come to pick.  "I knew putting the pear tree up would entice one or two people over."  :(

And so, not willing to give the precious pears to charity and hating to see the crab apples waste, I picked and picked.  Gave 60 pounds to charity next day and had a basket for me - though I wasn't ready to deal with them for a couple of days.  Maybe that's why when I did, or maybe as they should have been harvested earlier, they turned into "crapplesauce."  Seeing as even the kids wouldn't eat the gritty-textured stuff, I ended up baking lots of recipes that called for as much applesauce as I could find.  And I still have jars suitable only for that purpose.   Even with wonderful apples, it's discouraging enough to do all the work of making and canning if thoughts of how those six jars of organic apple sauce could have been bought for $3.50 each.  (I tried to not think this way and so enjoy the process and results!)  But this batch was hard going, dealing with them late at night even before I knew they'd be so icky.  I must have taken this photo as a reminder to self for next season:  NO MORE APPLES!  At least not late-in-the-season crab apples!  

I still have a bucket of frozen chokecherries to turn into jam, but just couldn't get to it this summer.  I hope it'll be as yummy as the memory of my Grandma's - though her homemade white bread was half the delight, I'm sure.

*There are a few similar organizations to Fruitshare throughout Canada - Vancouver Fruit Tree is one of them.  Many groups have volunteers harvest and then deliver the fruit to charitable organizations or community groups who could use them.  Super great!  Fruit Share appeals to those of us who are less altruistic, as we get some of the harvest, too.  And since I have no local access to free blackberries or reasonably priced peaches, cherries or other lovely Lower Mainland and BC fruit, I have to cherish the apples. :)

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Our other food venture this summer was buying a Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) share through Canadian Mennonite University's farm.  In Spring, we'd paid a few hundred dollars to the collective farming group and then waited to see how the garden would grow and whether our investment would pay out well through the summer.  Starting in mid-June we stopped by the farm to pick up our weekly box of organic produce.  Fortunately, the growing season went fairly well and so we received our money's worth and more by the time it wrapped up early September.  The risk with a CSA is that if there is a drought or other negative unforeseen circumstances,  the share holders will receive less produce than hoped.  

It was certainly great to have produce picked one afternoon and within hours be riding home in S's backpack or with me in the van.  No packaging, no transfer costs, little loss of nutrients.   Many get this pleasure by home gardening, which isn't something we do.  We'd hope to dig up the concrete pads of our backyard to at least lay down grass and eventually a garden.  We've since learned:  1.  How costly it is to do so.  We'll have to budget that one out over the year(s).  2.  How toxic the ground in our area of the city is.  With houses packed side by side since the 1890s, the soil has excessive levels of lead and arsenic.  We'll have to do garden boxes when/if the time arises.  I'll have to prove I can have my house plants thrive before I start down the path of gardening . . .

It felt right to support a local initiative trying to do their part to live sustainably and helping others do so, too.  Managed by people we greatly respect as practical environmentalists, teaching CMU students how to provide good, healthy foods - what's not to like about that. :)  And I loved having fresh cucumbers well into October and felt so sad when we had to go back to store-bought English ones.   The kids really complained about that one, too.  It was pretty cool knowing that through Caoroline Chartrand - a Métis seed keeper -  the CMU farm planted an 850 year old variety of winter squash.  The original seeds were recovered from an archaeological dig in Wisconsin and had been carbon dated.  They germinated, so select people were given the offspring to grow - with the need to hand-pollinate them to prevent contamination.  That was the most exciting thing in our boxes, but we definitely had some other yummy produce this summer .

Kenton Lobe & Caroline Chartrand with some other varieties of hand-pollinated squash

The challenge came with not being fully ready for the lifestyle of a food sharer.  I discovered I needed to be organized to deal with a sudden weekly onslaught of greens across my counter.  What to do with those herbs this week, what is that stuff - mustard plant?,  what can I freeze or preserve.  With my summer company, sometimes I just didn't get to it in time.    Sometimes new-to-me heirloom veggies would come and I'd find them weeks later withered in a bag.  Some of those newish to me foods, like the now "in" kale, would be relished and anticipated the following weeks only to have kale replaced by a different green the following Thursday.  The harvest changed from week to week - so fun, but hard to plan ahead.  Planning is never my forte, definitely wasn't this summer . . .

One week I just couldn't get myself sorted out.  It was disappointing enough to go to the half-off everything thrift store sale Tuesday, only to discover it was really Wednesday.  Didn't change my week, as I went to get my farm share Thursday, only to find no one at the farm and no produce anywhere.  It was Friday! So sad, since it was the major week for tomatoes and squash.  I still got a trickling later, but no canning salsa this year! :(  Maybe with my apple fixation, it was a blessing in disguise (at least for some other person who got our goods that week!!).

I'm loathe to admit how much I let go to waste (which feels far worse when you know the farmers and how hard they worked to make that green thing grow!)  But the end of summer found me better assessing the likelihood of timely dealing with foods so some friends benefited from our investment by getting eggplants, chilli peppers, swiss chard and such before they died.  Throughout summer,  I still found myself zipping over to Superstore to purchase produce we're used to having - bell peppers from BC Greenhouses, snap peas from California, celery from somewhere America and cilantro from Mexico.  We can hardly be considered wanna-be locavores, but it inspired us to at least think more about where our food comes from and change some of our purchasing.

Will we do it again next summer?  If we travel, we'd potentially lose out on too much.  If that's not an issue, however, I'd say we will.  Now that I know what is needed for effort on my part, I'd definitely get some form of a game plan. I feel fortunate that we live close to opportunities such as this.