ON A SUNNY Saturday morning, a team of 10 volunteers unloads ladders, clippers, buckets, and long-handled fruit pickers with metal fingers on the street in front of an upscale home in the Santa Clara County city of Los Altos.
Their mission, according to Village Harvest executive director Craig Diserens, is to harvest two fruit trees in the side yard. One tree contains Valencia oranges and the other is full of Eureka lemons.
Some volunteers wear gloves to avoid the thorns on the lemon tree. The fruit goes into buckets as the volunteers work their way from the bottom to top of each tree.
Volunteers include retiree Suresh Mohan, 69, and his wife Susan, of Los Gatos. “I like picking fruit,” he said, although citrus is not his favorite. “I find apples and pears the most fun to pick because you always have to pick by hand.”
Other harvesters include the mother-daughter team of Kim and Mia Monsalve of Los Altos, who say they enjoy meeting other volunteers and learning about the types of fruit they’re picking.
Twenty minutes after the volunteers start, the first containers of citrus fruit are brought to Village Harvest’s white van, and the sorting begins. Leaves and stems are clipped off, and damaged fruit is removed before it can spoil. Volunteers can take home the damaged fruit, while the rest is packed in crates that will go to local food banks.
Diserens, who co-founded the organization in Palo Alto in 2001, tallies up the pickings. From two trees, they’ve gathered 72 pounds of oranges and 60 pounds of lemons, which mean that 132 people will get a week’s worth of the fruit. He leaves a receipt for the homeowners, who can claim the donated fruit as a tax deduction.
The whole operation takes 40 minutes. Then the group loads up and heads to the next house in the neighborhood near Mountain View High School.
More than 50 tons of fruit in a year
Multiply one fruit harvest by 200 and you get an idea of how Village Harvest, based in San Jose, provides thousands of pounds of fruit each year to local food banks. Over 700 volunteers participate annually. Figures from 2023 show Village Harvest volunteers picked over 108,000 pounds of fresh fruit from homes and small orchards in the South Bay.
It’s a way to provide fresh produce that would otherwise be wasted.
“Trees get very happy and produce lots more fruit than owners can use themselves,” Diserens said.
Village Harvest operates year-round with volunteers picking different fruits depending on the season. Citrus and persimmon are the top fruits, but stone fruit, apples and pears are also harvested.
Diserens said other harvesting groups operate throughout the Bay Area, with some of the most active groups in Petaluma and Healdsburg in Sonoma County. A directory of other Bay Area food harvesting groups can be found on the group’s website, or by calling its office at 888-FRUIT-411.
Diserens says the group is the Bay Area’s oldest and largest fruit harvesting organization, operating in Santa Clara, San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties.
“We give priority to people who cannot physically pick their own tree,” he said.
Residents who are physically able to pick their own fruit can look on the group’s website for instructions on how to donate their yard’s bounty to local food banks.
Second Harvest of Silicon Valley, a food bank that feeds a half a million people a month, works closely with Village Harvest, said Barbara Gehlen, director of food services there. “It’s been a really wonderful partnership working with them,” she said.