Sharing your home-grown fruit with others

Whether or not you have fruit trees at your home, you can help two nonprofits in the Portland-Vancouver area that glean fruit from city trees to give to people who don’t have enough fresh food.

Several key volunteer leaders at Friends of Trees work with Urban Abundance in Vancouver, WA, a nonprofit whose website says brings “smiles, free fresh fruit, and other urban-raised bounty to residents of Vancouver, WA.”

Longtime Friends of Trees volunteer leader and Vancouver Urban Forestry Commissioner Erika Johnson heads up the gleaning effort for Urban Abundance.

“We harvest fruit from trees that would otherwise fall to the ground and rot, and donate it to the emergency food system,” she explains. “We also work with local emerging landscape designers to install community orchards.”

You can learn more about gleaning and other ways to help on the Urban Abundance web site.  Or write [email protected], call 360-771-1296, or check out the Urban Abundance Facebook page.

You can celebrate all of Vancouver’s trees at the city’s Arbor Day Ceremony on April 14. Friends of Trees looks forward to joining the city for the event, which begins at 1 p.m. at Clark College and is being held in conjunction with the annual Sakura festival to celebrate the blossoming cherry trees.

If you live in Portland and want to harvest fruit for people who don’t have access to fresh, locally-grown food, check out the Portland Fruit Tree Project. According to the nonprofit’s web site, more than 13 percent of Oregonians don’t have access to locally-grown, fresh produce, which is vital to healthy diets.

And, of course, you can plant your own fruit trees in your yard this April. Friends of Trees’ annual Fruit Tree Giveaway will be on April 23, beginning at 10 a.m., at Friends of Trees’ office, 3117 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Portland.

–TR