Gratitude from “The Gleaners”

Thank you Quimper Community Harvest Gleaners!   

It’s the end of a challenging but very abundant season and time now to enjoy what’s left of that fresh, frozen, dried, sauced, canned, juiced, jammed, caramelized and fermented fruit we picked. Despite social distancing, this year was our biggest year ever, by a lot.  This year we delivered 18,254* pounds of fruit (4500 pounds more than our previous record) to 17 organizations**.  In the past it would have been a real challenge to make sure that much fruit was well used in our community, and this year was even tougher that usual with less students in school and heightened restrictions on deliveries to senior facilities.  Luckily  Jim did some research and found Fabio, a 1HP machine that turns hundreds of pounds of cooked apples into applesauce each hour.  With Laurie in the lead and 15 of you helping over 6 weeks, 7000 pounds of ugly apples were washed, cooked and run through Fabio to make 5449 pounds of tasty applesauce which has been frozen and will be served weekly to students.  Conveniently, that is the amount Stacey calculated she could use in a year feeding students. It’s hard to overstate how much this will improve our ability to feed the community with local fruit going forward.  All those apples with skin blemishes, or ones that were not crunchy enough, or too hard can make excellent sauce.   Special thanks to Sharon, Paula, Mary, and Sonny for doing the bulk of the tree checks (that is truly the most crucial job), Paula for sewing picking bags and masks for everyone, doing all the Chimacum deliveries and coming to every gleaning day, Laurie for being Queen of the Orchard and Sauce, Mary for trouble shooting uncountable situations and Jim for thinking outside the box and bringing a new idea to life. Many thanks to all who came, picked, and then came back! We had a lot of great returning and new gleaners this year and many awesome kids.   I hope to see you all in the trees next year.  

Seth 

PS, I do hope to have a pruning workshop in January or February, though I don’t think we’ll be doing the orchard mulching day this year.   

And a couple thank you’s to share  from tree owners: 

Thank you!  Your crew was absolutely wonderful and I’m so grateful to them for their labor of love this morning.  It makes me so happy that these apples will go to feed my community, the small ones and the old ones both.  Hannah 

Hi Seth.

Sorry you couldn’t get out our way this time. It was a great crew—hard working, efficient. I talked with Rachael and a guy (sorry, didn’t get his name) as the crew was packing up to leave. It was a gorgeous day and everyone appeared to be happy. It makes us happy that they were happy! Best of all, it delights us that our fruit is doing good for the people in this wonderful area. Thank you and the “field hands” for volunteering the time and effort. Neil

*Doing the math per pound we picked and delivered about 10,766 plums, 426 pears, 1888 Asian pears and 51,754 apples (plus a few thousand for ourselves).  Well done! 


** Chimacum School District, Port Townsend School District, Cedarbrook School, Tri Area Food Bank, Port Townsend Food Bank, Tri Area Senior meals, San Juan Commons, San Juan Dementia facility, Discovery Apartments, Avameer, Claridge Court, Episcopal Soup Kitchen, Jefferson Health Care, JC Anti-Racist Fund, Marine Plaza, Dove House, Jefferson Healthcare

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