Last year’s edition of the Langley Community Harvest collected a small mountain of fresh fruit.
“It was incredible,” said Ava Reeve, environmental program coordinator with the Langley Environmental Partners Society (LEPS). “We harvested three or four times what we normally do.”
That resulted in a harvest of 12,000 pounds of fruit, of which 9,000 pounds was donated to local food banks and homeless shelters.
There were a few factors that helped out in 2016, good weather and pollination among them.
But Reeve is still aiming to try to get as close to that level as possible this year.
The Langley Community Harvest uses volunteers to collect fruit from trees in local back yards and a few participating public parks.
Across the Lower Mainland, there are old apple, plum, and pear trees. Many were planted half a century ago, when much of the Fraser Valley was still farmland.
As suburbs grew, backyard trees still produced box after box of fruit every year.
The harvest project is one of several in the Lower Mainland that aim to put that fruit to good use, if the owners can’t handle it all.
Tree owners can contact Reeve, and she’ll turn up with some volunteers, ladders, and fruit picking gear.
The tree owners can take one third of the crop, the volunteers another third, and the remaining third will go to Langley’s two food banks, the food bank in Aldergrove, to the Salvation Army Gateway of Hope shelter, and to a community kitchen in Cloverdale.
Because owners and volunteers sometimes take less than a third, a full three quarters of everything collected less year went to local shelters.
Reeve sang the praises of the volunters.
“They’re very dedicated, they’re awesome,” she said.
About 60 to 65 volunteers come out for most seasons, and they conducted 40 harvests. A few saw them returning to the same properties more than once as different trees ripened.
With the cool, wet spring this year, things are a little slower to be ready for picking than last year.
“Cherries will be first,” said Reeve.
“Last year we had already started harvesting the cherries by this time,” she noted.
After that, plums are the other big early summer crop. Langley has a large number of plum trees.
The program runs from the summer into the fall, when the apple crop is finished.
Anyone interested in volunteering to pick fruit, or to have their trees harvested, can call Reeve at 604-546-0337, or email Agriculture@leps.bc.ca.