More urbanites have their pick of fresh fruit

Barbara Feeney and Frank Iltis plant a fruit tree at Jessica Bullen Orchard and Quiet Garden in Madison, Wis. Photo by Steve Apps.

Fruit Tree Planting Foundation has provided trees and advice to planting projects in 20 states

By Ben Jones,
USA Today
3/8/2010

Excerpt:

Last fall, Eric Alperin, a San Francisco artist, heard about blackberries, plums and loquats growing on public property in his city and free for the picking.

Armed with bags and a pole device for picking fruit from tall branches, Alperin and his wife went foraging.

“It was great,” he said. “We picked as much as we could carry and had beautiful, fresh, free city fruit,” Alperin said. “I’ll definitely go (picking) again.” Fruit-picking opportunities like that are becoming more common, as volunteers in cities including Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia and Madison, Wis., mobilize behind a goal of planting fruit trees on public land in city parks and neighborhoods.

“This is part of what’s obviously been an explosion in interest in locally grown and organic food,” said Janet Parker, a founding member of a group called Madison Fruits and Nuts. “I think we’re coming to realize more and more that it doesn’t make any sense, at this late date with climate change being what it is, to truck in so much of our food from California, in the cases of apples, sometimes New Zealand.”

Free fruit also is available for picking in season on public land in Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, Minneapolis and New York, according to neighborhoodfruit.com, a site that helps people track down available fruit.

Parker works with other volunteers to add fruit trees to parks in her Wisconsin city, which has a population of 27,700. The group wants to initially plant trees in four parks and awaits city approval.

It seeks funding from a California-based non-profit, the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation, which helps establish fruit trees at parks and schools. Cem Akin, the foundation’s executive director, said fruit trees in parks are not new, but there’s been “recent movement toward getting more trees into city parks, more free nutrition into city parks as well.”

Akin said that in the past year, his group has been inundated with funding requests from cities and counties in California, Nevada, Georgia, Wyoming, Florida, Arizona and Vermont. The group will make funding decisions on these projects this year.

Since 2005, the foundation has provided trees and advice to planting projects in 20 states, Akin said.

“It’s a good way to get the community mobilized. It’s a good way to get everybody to learn about sustainability, about environmental stewardship and about botany,” he said. “Our goal is to strategically donate and plant fruit tree orchards to areas where the harvest most benefits communities.”

Akin said that in some cities, groups glean fruit from urban orchards and donate the produce to food pantries.

Read the rest of the article here.

Visit the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation here.

The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation, We are an international nonprofit organization dedicated to planting fruitful trees and plants to benefit human communities and heal the earth. We locate our orchards where they will benefit communities the most–at public parks, school yards, food banks, homeless shelters, Native American reservations, and communities in the developing world. We work in communities throughout the world to site orchards that serve as community assets, providing fresh food, creating a focal point for community organizing, and benefiting wildlife.