Gleaners pull together for community

SANDPOINT — There is an orchard in Sandpoint that is so immense, you can stand at its center and never see the outward borders.

Each year at this time, the trees in this orchard become laden with fruit. Some of it is picked and enjoyed. Thousands more pounds fall to the ground and rot. If you live in town, part of that orchard might be in your own back yard, or that of a neighbor on either side.

Here and there, individuals and small groups of friends have been gathering that fruit as part of a volunteer effort that dates back thousands of years. They are called gleaners. And their modern-day work is rooted in an Old Testament admonition to share unharvested food and feed the poor.

Pure Potential

Last week, a young man named Adrian Smith worked in the rain in one of Sandpoint’s historic neighborhoods. He gathered pears from the ground and filled white plastic buckets with the ripe fruit. Just as he has done for the past seven years, Smith keeps an eye out for trees that are dropping fruit, plucks up his courage and knocks on the resident’s door to ask if he can gather the food.

“I think of myself as a person who tries to identify potential,” he said, brushing up against a low-hanging branch that showered his already wet clothing with another dousing of water. “And all of this fruit on the ground is nothing but pure potential.”

So far this year, Smith and a few friends have gathered boxes of cherries and grapes and gallons of berries, thanks to homeowners who have more fruit coming in than they can use. Around town, the pear trees are starting to drop their harvest, with apple trees right behind them.

In the midst of this urban orchard, the young gleaner stood next to a row of pear trees and pointed out some of the other fruit trees located nearby. There are huge cherry trees on that lot, he said, and several types of plums right over there. Apples are hanging from trees next door and more pears litter the ground across the alley.

“There’s an abundance of good food around here,” he said. “Everywhere you look, there’s food in this town. And most of the time, when you approach the homeowner and ask permission, people are just happy to get the fruit off their lawns and happy to see it get used.”

Smith takes some of the food home, where he has three children to feed. The remainder gets dropped off at the food bank and on the porches of needy families he knows around the community. His favorite drop-off point is the homes of seniors he has met, as they know how to can the fruit and cut grocery costs during the rest of the year.

“I’d like to reach out even more to that generation — the Depression Generation — because they love good, fresh fruit and they know how to put it up,” said Smith.

Early Harvester

Some folks call him “Sprouts.”  Others know him as Jeffrey. The people at the Bonner Community Food Bank refer to him as “that nice guy who drives the beat-up pickup truck and brings us food.”

For more than 25 years, Jeff Rich has been harvesting the overflow from local gardens and fruit trees and sharing the bounty with the community. As he sees younger people taking up the cause, he grows more confident that the work will continue.

“I love it,” Rich said. “It does my heart good and I wish it could be increased even more. There’s so much food that goes to waste.”

For about three months every year, the long-time gleaner brings in fruit as it ripens. The plums are almost done, pears are coming in now and Rich is ready to pick apples in the next few weeks. Beyond simply gathering the harvest, he tends the trees that provide it. And, just as often, he educates owners about their inherent worth.

“I’ve had people who threatened to cut down trees because they were making a mess,” Rich said. “I go in and prune them for the owners and, later on, I go back and pick up the fruit as fast as it falls.”

Until recently, Jeff Rich has been the consummate lone wolf when it comes to gleaning food and sharing it. But he sees the value in a more organized approach to food gathering and he welcomes the addition of a new generation of kindred souls.

“We could be giving tons of food to hungry people by using the energy of our young people,” he said.

Pulling Together

Cindy Peer is active on the Sandpoint Transition Initiative’s Waste-Free Committee. While that spoke of the STI wheel prepares to tackle larger projects, she views the chance to organize local gleaners as something that falls under the same umbrella.

“The more we can do to involve the community, the better,” she said. “Right now, we’re looking for people who are interested in picking fruit. Soon — real soon — we’re going to have to organize a work group and then find people who can use the fruit we pick.”

The other item on Peer’s organization list is locating homeowners who are willing to let volunteers gather fruit on their properties.

This same process has been successful in Bellingham, Wash., where the Bellingham Food Bank operates a community gleaning program that has been underway for the past 10 years. Mike Cohen, the food bank’s executive director, calls it a “three-legged stool” made up of volunteers, homeowners and farmers, and sites that receive the gleaned food.

“Last year, we gleaned 135,000 pounds of food,” Cohen said. “Our annual target is usually about 100,000 pounds.”

Working with organic farmers who are about to plow under their fields and homeowners who want their yards cleared of fallen fruit, the food bank sends out what Cohen calls “a gleaning Bat Signal” to its volunteer base. Within a few hours, 10-20 people have responded. Within a day or two, those volunteers have gathered the food and distributed it to food banks, soup kitchens, low-income housing sites, boy’s and girl’s clubs and senior centers.

The volunteers come from all over the Bellingham area — churches looking for a meaningful way to help others, 4-H groups that focus on community service, citizens of all stripes who simply can’t stand to see people go hungry while food goes to waste.

“It’s amazing how much food even a half dozen people can glean in just a couple of hours,” the executive director said. “It’s an exciting program. For a pretty low cost, you get a lot of food and a lot of great community education and interaction.”

Branching Out

Like Jeff Rich, Adrian Smith is a grassroots gleaner. He has friends and acquaintances who also believe that good food should be gathered and shared, but has, until now, been too busy picking the fruit to pull those people together.

“It doesn’t take that long for me to pick enough fruit for my family and several other families, too,” Smith said.

“There are a lot of people who do this, but we’re unorganized. If we were organized, just think what we could accomplish.”

In Bonner County, the local food bank welcomes the idea of a more codified approach that would benefit its clients.

“We’ve never had any trouble distributing any amount of food the gleaners bring us,” said Alice Wallace, executive director for the Bonner Community Food Bank.“When the gleaners come in, it means we’re getting fresh produce, which we can always use,” she added. “We put it out front and it just goes. We’d love to see a good gleaning organization get started here.”

People like Adrian Smith, Jeff Rich and Cindy Peer feel the same way. This Tuesday, Sept. 28, they will attend an informal meeting at 11 a.m. at Monarch Mountain Coffee in Sandpoint for those interested in gleaning.

When Alice Wallace learned that volunteer gleaners were preparing to pull together, she stepped in to offer the Bonner Community Food Bank as a contact center for homeowners who have fruit trees or gardens they would like to have harvested, knowing that some of the food will come back to feed her clients.

Food on the ground, volunteers to gather it and organizations that stand ready to distribute the bounty — the three-legged stool of community gleaning, it seems, has come to Sandpoint.

 To donate fruit to the harvest, call the Bonner Community Food Bank at (208) 263-3663. For more information on volunteering as a gleaner call: (208) 597-2023