Do you have extra fruit? A Sacramento group will pick it up to help those in need

Many a Sacramentan have driven through the city’s leafy neighborhoods and seen the problem. It can be hard to ignore those piles of citrus fruits going bad under a tree that someone was once really excited to plant. Community Fruit is a local group that’s working hard to match up that perfectly good fruit with people fighting food insecurity.

Community Fruit is part of Find Out Farms, an environmental action group, but working to become its own nonprofit. Find Out Farms also offers community composting and classes on soil health, seeds, germinations and other easy-to-digest botany lessons. At the head of it all is Matthew Ampersand, a professional gardener who says, “I’ve been a food person my whole life.” He loves helping families learn about science through food, and teaching about regenerative agriculture.

It’s doubtful anyone plants a fruit tree planning to let the fruit go to waste. “Fresh oranges in winter!” they once thought. Years later, there’s too much fruit for one household to eat, or the novelty of it has worn off. Sometimes the tree is already there when a homeowner buys a house. Sometimes those trees belong to seniors who no longer have someone to pick or eat the fruit. Whatever the case, if you’re interested in sharing your fruit, Community Fruit would like to help.

Ampersand noticed the issue while biking around his neighborhood a couple years ago, and he saw an opportunity.

“I just connected the dots,” he said. “We could divert food waste and help with food sovereignty.”

In the beginning, he saw enough fruit for the neighborhood. He kicked off Community Fruit in 2020 as a monthly free fruit farmstand in south Oak Park. He and a few volunteers would head out to harvest once a month and then give away all the fruit. They posted in Facebook groups looking for people with fruit available. In 2020, they harvested and gave away about 10,000 pounds of fruit. In 2021, it was 20,000 pounds.

This year, Community Fruit has many local partner organizations it works with to distribute fruit besides the free fruit farmstand. Wellspring Women’s Center, Neighbor Program, Alchemist CDC, Community Connections 95820, and Harvest Sacramento help provide the group with fresh, seasonal fruits.

Community Fruit has gone from needing a few volunteers and Ampersand’s 1998 Tacoma truck to needing an insulated storage shed and a bucket truck. Throughout January, volunteers are working with the Tacoma, a few ladders, some snips and picker pulls, and fruit bags. People donate their paper grocery bags for Community Fruit to use for distribution. They work fast to move the fruit so it doesn’t need to be stored, but Ampersand is dreaming of the day that more can be set aside in a shed to keep it safe from weather and pests.

The Sacramento area is so good for growing fruit that there is an overabundance just from trees in people’s yards. An average mature orange tree will provide around 300 pounds of oranges. And a grapefruit tree? Those can grow up to 80 feet tall and yield 1,000 pounds of grapefruit. Ampersand’s advice for homeowners is fairly simple: “If you’re going to plant a fruit tree, make sure it’s something you like to eat.”

Ampersand says it has become clear to him there is a huge need for urban gleaning in the Sacramento area. That’s why he hopes to turn Community Fruit into a nonprofit to grow the effort as best possible.

It’s about more than not wasting good fruit. According to CalRecyle, organic matter in landfills emits 20% of the methane in the state; half of what ends up in the landfills is organic matter. Much of that is food that could have been recovered to help feed the 23% of Californians who aren’t sure where their next meal is coming from.

Community Fruit will come and harvest any kind of fruit — volunteers have picked grapefruit, oranges, lemons, tangerines, mandarins, kumquats, limequats, peaches, pears, apples, persimmons, grapes, figs and even rangpur limes. They also love if you can harvest your own fruit and they can come pick it up or have you drop it off. Since that’s not a reasonable option for a lot of people, the volunteers can come to you.

More about Community Fruit

Community Fruit is funded by donations. You can find out more information on becoming a monthly donor through their Patreon, or make a one-time donation on their website, findoutfarms.com. Or you can donate through their Go Fund Me page. You can also fill out a form on the website if you have fruit to share. Follow them on Facebook (Find Out Farms) or Instagram (@findoutfarms) to stay up to date on the fruit stand, if you are in need of fruit. And if you know of an available bucket truck someone might like to donate, Matthew Ampersand would like to talk to you.

This story was originally published January 19, 2022 at 7:22 AM.