In tough times, fresh fruit becomes an expensive luxury for many families – even as tons of it rots on the ground in residential neighborhoods and gets smashed underfoot.

It's that time of year when fruit tumbles from backyard trees and coats the ground in a sticky jam of figs, plums, peaches and apricots.

Property owners with fruit trees know there's only so much you can eat or share with friends before the trees become a messy nuisance or a waste you try to ignore.

What to do with the bounty?

Across the region, an increasing number of volunteer gleaners are coming together to pick trees and share the fruit with folks in need.

In Davis, Joe Schwartz and a band of gleaners with the local chapter of a group called Village Harvest knocked on Luis Bodero's door Wednesday.

Bodero had summoned them in desperation as his backyard burst with apricots, grapes, figs and apples.

"Thanks for coming," Bodero said breathlessly as he waved the gleaners through his home. "I have a lot of things. For example, all my loquats."

His yard is a sun-dappled garden of mature fruit trees behind a 1960s-era tract house.

Schwartz and his fellow volunteers took their places beneath an apricot tree, the boughs heavy with fruit, the ground slippery with pulp.

Then they opened a blue tarp and shook the branches. The five volunteers filled two large containers with about 50 pounds of apricots.

Bodero, a real estate agent who grew up in Peru, said he couldn't stand seeing the food go to waste.

"I'm coming from a very poor country," he said. "We never throw food. I decided I had to do something."

The fruit that the Village Harvest group gleans goes to charity organizations in Davis. Homeowners can write off their donations at tax time.

Schwartz said his group harvested 360 pounds of grapefruit on Monday and took them to the Short Term Emergency Aid Committee, a nonprofit group that helps low-income residents referred by social workers.

The group's food bank is primarily stocked with non-perishable items, such as canned soup and dried pasta.

The five boxes of fresh grapefruit at the door were a welcome treat for clients who'd come by that morning, said volunteer Will Benware.

Business has been brisk in the recession, he said. "Things are flying off the shelves."

Some grapefruit were distributed to Davis Community Meals, a group that operates a homeless shelter and provides free meals at a church.

Schwartz, a 77-year-old retiree, said he was moved to start a gleaning group in Davis when he saw a news story on a similar effort in Berkeley. He knew that hundreds of fruit trees in Davis neighborhoods drop tons of fruit each year.

"All this fruit going to waste," Schwartz said. "And there are people who never get to eat fresh fruit."

Schwartz, his wife and another couple started a branch of Village Harvest, an organization based in San Jose with chapters around the Bay Area.

Afterward he found there were several other gleaning startups in Davis.

Schwartz's fellow volunteers on Wednesday included Maggie Lickter, a UC Davis student who had helped found The Gleaning Project.

She and other students harvest citrus fruit during the school year and deliver it to the Food Bank of Yolo County. The group's volunteer pool shrinks over the summer break.

Many communities in the region now have gleaning groups. Senior Gleaners, based in Sacramento, is the oldest and largest.

Dozens of charities such as Loaves & Fishes pull up to the group's loading docks each week and pick up tons of produce to feed the hungry, said spokeswoman Deb Ling.

She said Senior Gleaners provides the fixings for about 300,000 meals per month and always welcomes donations

"We are looking for individuals whose fruit is falling off the vine or off the tree, and we would love to salvage that fruit so the hungry can utilize it," she said. "All they have to do is contact us, and we'll put them on the schedule."

A group called Harvest Sacramento started up last year as a loose coalition of residents in east Sacramento and Oak Park who collected fruit off their neighborhood trees, said Paul Towers, one of the coordinators.

"Neighbors started knocking on neighbors' doors and asking if they'd share their produce with the local food bank," he said.

The Sacramento Food Bank & Family Services in Oak Park benefits from the group's efforts. And Towers said the effort helps nurture a sense of community.

"Fresh, healthy food is one of the first things to go out the door when the wallet's in a pinch," Towers said.

"You walk down almost any street in urban Sacramento and you'll see trees bursting with fruit," he said. "We use the surplus that comes from the fertile soils of Sacramento and goes to those in the greatest need."

Call The Bee's Hudson Sangree, (916) 321-1191.