On a sunny summer morning in Vancouver, Washington, the plum tree in Kaitlynd Grey’s front yard is overflowing with ripe yellow fruit. The branches are so weighed down that they are bent and nearly touching the ground.

“We weren’t aware that we were getting any fruit trees when we moved in,” said Grey. “This is our first home, so we’ve never even had a lawn.”

Grey stands in a mostly empty room, moving boxes piled in the center. It’s only been a week in their new home and one of their first problems to solve is what to do about the urban orchard in their front yard.

“Those plums are definitely on a clock, they’re going to start dropping and I don’t want to waste them, but I don’t have the time and energy to take care of them right now,” she said.

Enter: the Portland Fruit Tree Project. Since 2006, this grassroots nonprofit has been harvesting fruit from backyards, overgrown community gardens, the sidelines of school sports fields and long-forgotten parking strips.

With just five full-time staff and a handful of seasonal employees, they coordinate more than 150 harvests during the growing season, each staffed by volunteers from the community.

“Some people come multiple times, but other people come once every couple of years,” said Heather Keisler Fornes, the executive director at the Portland Fruit Tree Project. “We welcome all levels of engagement, so wherever we can fit into people’s lives, we want to do that.”

This area of Oregon has a centuries-old connection to fruit trees — ever since Henderson Luelling’s “traveling nursery” transported 700 grafted fruit trees across the Oregon Trail and set up in what is now Portland’s Sellwood neighborhood. Now, the metro area has thousands of fruiting trees, shrubs and bushes, many without people nearby with the means or desire to harvest them.

“We hear from people who are seniors who planted a bunch of trees, and now they can’t maintain them anymore,” said Keisler Fornes. “Or the family that moved in and didn’t know they had all those fruit trees…That’s a really common story, too.”

Even people who volunteer for harvest shifts, like 76-year-old Christos Efthimiadis, are utilizing the Portland Fruit Tree Project.

“I have 15 grape vines, 10 figs, two plum trees, two pomegranates and of course the garden,” he said. “It’s a big garden to harvest with just yourself or your family.”

Efthimiadis has been volunteering with the nonprofit for a decade and even though his health no longer allows him to climb ladders to harvest, his green thumb and decades of experience make him a crucial volunteer.

“Somebody called from Salem or The Dalles [who had] olive trees,” he said. “They called me and we took 10 people in the van and we were picking olives and I taught them how to marinate them.”

Harvesting surplus fruit so it doesn’t go to waste is not a new idea, it’s a centuries-old tradition with biblical roots called gleaning. For the Portland Fruit Tree Project, the mission also encompasses redistributing the gleaned fruit within the community to increase equitable access to healthy food.

Last year, the nonprofit donated more than 28,000 pounds of fruit to dozens of community partners like senior centers, food pantries and culturally specific organizations.

“One of the things we try to do is match their needs to what we’re picking,” explained Hannelore Buckenmeyer, a summer AmeriCorps associate who helped lead the harvest. “For example, we have an Asian-American community organization that had shared that they love ginkgo nuts and that’s something that was new for us.”

In the basement of a community center in Northeast Portland, a different group of volunteers are gathered around a set of long folding tables, cutting out bruises or bug damage from plums and peaches, or thinly slicing apples to be dehydrated.

“Sometimes the fruit is gorgeous and it is ready to go out to pantries right away,” explained Keisler Fornes. “Other times it has damage or it’s overripe or it’s underripe, and that’s something that we’re not going to bring to our pantry partners because then it becomes a burden on the people who are taking it.”

In the early years of the Portland Fruit Tree Project, she said fruit that was not top-tier would have been composted, but today it gets a second life through a variety of food preservation projects.

“Now we make jams and jellies, dehydrated things, and today I’ll be starting our first batch of vinegar,” she said.

The preserved items are sold through their website or at local farmers markets as another stream of income for the nonprofit.

At the property in Vancouver, there was something to harvest at nearly every turn — apples, figs, grapes and currants, but the focus for the volunteers was the abundance of yellow plums.

“It feels like it’s helping the tree, it’s almost relieved when you take hundreds of pounds off of it,” said Buckenmeyer. “It’s helping the homeowner, and then it’s so much bounty that we’re able to give to partners.”

In under two hours, volunteers picked around 500 pounds of plums, along with nine pints of blackcurrants and a half dozen figs. Outside of the growing season, the Portland Fruit Tree Project hosts community pruning programs to keep the city’s urban orchard healthy and abundant.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/08/22/a-portland-nonprofit-takes-fruit-gleaning-into-backyards-parking-strips-and-public-parks/