Trees that make food.

Last summer I started volunteering for the Oregon Food Bank in their Learning Garden. They have two gardens where they grow fresh fruit and vegetables (and have chickens for eggs) to give to the Food Bank. I volunteered several times last year and learned a lot about gardening in the process. I got to mulch, plant watermelon starters, pick all varieties of beans, harvest Chard, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and feed chickens. I'm really looking forward to when the garden reopens this spring for the volunteers. But, this weekend they are hosting a fruit tree pruning workshop, which Mike and I are attending.

The last place I lived I learned what happens when you let a fruit tree go wild. My house becamse dubbed “Pearhouse”. In the backyard there was a pear tree, maybe 30 feet high. There was no way to get to the fruit that was growing and apparently if you let a fruit tree get that large it bitters the fruit. And also apparently when full grown pears drop from 30 feet they are scary!! It literally got to the point that I would put on my bicycle helmet if I had to do something in the yard. A couple pears grazed me and hit my side, but I thankfully never had a direct hit. Every few days I would go into the yard and load up all the fallen pears into baskets and throw them over the fence into the empty lot next door. It was ridiculous the amount of pears that would fall. And I would have to try and pressure wash the deck with the garden hose to get the pear guts off and the wasps away. It has a headache! And the worst part was I never got to eat one of the pears. They were too bitter and would pretty much explode when they hit the ground anyway.

One of the many selling points of my house now was that it already had four fruit trees on the property (and apparently my neighbor has a walnut tree that drops half in my yard). In the back yard there is a cherry tree (right) and an apple tree (left). They are both pretty large, but not so large that they can't be riegned in. In the front yard there is a small pear tree and a small apple tree and these are just the perfect size. The problem is none of these trees have been pruned well. They all need some love and some guidence, and the ones in the back do not need to get any bigger or else we'll have another “Pearhouse” on our hands.

So, I am really looking forward to heading over to the OFB Garden tomorrow morning to not only help them prune their trees in the little mini-orchard, but also to learn how to keep my trees in check so that next fall I can take all the fruits and use them and preserve them and get the most out of the food that my land is already producing for me.