Meet the Scrappy Volunteers Rescuing Fruit From Your Backyard

It was around 9 p.m. on a recent Sunday when the four-alarm email came through: A large number of volunteers were needed in Brentwood first thing Wednesday morning to harvest 80 peach trees — ideally before all of the lovely, softball-sized fruit dropped to the ground and went to waste.

With apologies for the short notice, the email asked, might I be able to help?

These are the kinds of messages that pop into your inbox when you join Contra Costa Fruit Rescue’s scrappy band of volunteer fruit pickers. The volunteers harvest surplus cherries, peaches, apples and pears — whatever’s in season — from backyard orchards throughout Contra Costa County, donating the rescued fruit to local food pantries and soup kitchens.

Fruit Rescue is just one of a handful of fruit gleaning operations overseen by the Castro Valley–based nonprofit ForestR, which runs similar programs in Dixon and Castro Valley. And while a peach emergency might not seem like the most pressing matter during this era of ICE raids and free speech crackdowns, the group’s efforts are making a real impact. So far in 2025, in Contra Costa County alone, Fruit Rescue has harvested and donated more than 75,000 pounds of usable fruit that would have otherwise gone to waste.

Those donations are even more crucial now, with the country teetering on the brink of a recession and food insecurity on the rise. Program lead Pat Schultz says the food banks she works with have seen their budgets slashed by a quarter or more, the result of funding cuts by both the Trump administration and the state of California. Meanwhile, the number of people who need food assistance has only gone up since the height of the pandemic.

“Especially with the high cost that we have in the Bay Area, it’s easy to go from ‘everything is fine’ to ‘I’m on the street or food insecure.’ Most people are one month away from disaster,” Schultz says. “The need for this type of work is only increasing.”

Even apart from the altruistic aspect of the work, Fruit Rescue’s gleaning events — which are open to anyone who signs up through the group’s Eventbrite page — are a fun, family-friendly way to spend a morning. The aforementioned peach-picking session didn’t wind up happening (backyard fruit can be a fickle enterprise), but my nine-year-old daughter and I drove out to Martinez’s Alhambra Valley on an impossibly clear-skied Tuesday morning to harvest about a dozen Bartlett pear trees in a tidy, picturesque frontyard orchard.

Amber Martinez, who heads up Fruit Rescue’s Martinez gleaning events, showed us how to use long, lacrosse-stick-like fruit-picker poles to nudge the ripe pears off the tree branches and gave a quick rundown of dos and don’ts. (DON’T climb the trees. DO place squishy, rotten pears into blue buckets so they can be composted later.) Working alongside seven or eight other volunteers — mostly affable retirees for this midweek session — we picked the trees clean in about an hour and a half, ready to move on to the next harvest site.

As an added bonus? The pears were so plentiful that each volunteer wound up taking home a bagful for themselves — including fruit with slight imperfections that many food pantries can’t accept.

Nancy Hobart, the homeowner, says she’s had fruit gleaners come harvest the pear and Fuyu persimmon trees on her property for the past 15 years because she hates to see food going to waste. Fruit Rescue has been the most reliable of these services. “They’re so professional,” she says. “There’s hardly a leaf left out in the orchard.”

Nimone Li-Hardisty says she and her husband, Yonaton Hardisty, founded ForestR — the nonprofit that operates Fruit Rescue — shortly after a conversation with their then-teenage children, who told them they weren’t planning on ever having kids of their own. “The world is burning,” Li-Hardisty recalls her children saying. “You guys messed it up.” Today, she remembers that conversation as an “oh shit” moment that made her want to be proactive about improving the planet. “We don’t want our kids to have to be on Mars,” she says.

As Li-Hardisty explains it, ForestR takes a highly localized, three-pronged approach to environmental beautification that includes cleaning (mainly of a stretch of highway in Castro Valley), greening (e.g. through planting trees and creating small “pocket parks”) and gleaning.

Schultz, the Contra Costa Fruit Rescue lead, joined forces with ForestR in 2022 to revive the gleaning program she’d been involved in for about a decade but had shut down during the pandemic. A retired music teacher, Schultz says her interest in food rescue stems from her Depression-era parents, who taught her that wasting food was not okay. “They were the original recyclers,” she says.

Here in the Bay Area, Schultz says interest in this kind of work accelerated during the pandemic, which “made people far more aware of food,” she says. Suddenly, in affluent parts of Contra Costa County like Lafayette, where Schultz lives, “You had to stand in line [at the grocery store,] and you may or may not get what you want.” Many people started gardening during that time, getting in touch with their yards in a deeper way — and they wanted to make sure the food they grew wouldn’t go to waste.

The upshot is that more and more people have reached out to Fruit Rescue to have their fruit trees gleaned. And it isn’t primarily folks like Hobart who have mini-orchards, essentially, in their yard, Schultz stresses. Most of the people who participate in the program only have one or two trees. “But one apple tree can easily yield 200 to 300 pounds,” she says. “One grapefruit tree can be 400 pounds.” In fact, Schultz says there’s one elderly gentleman who calls her every year about his apple tree, which only yields 10 pounds of apples — “but for him, it’s critical that this fruit not go to waste.” Schultz goes by herself each year to personally harvest his tree.

Fruit Rescue isn’t unique. A handful of similar organizations operate around the Bay Area, like Village Harvest, which is mostly based in the South Bay and Peninsula, and Urban Tilth, which oversees a network of small backyard orchards in Richmond. But these gleaning programs aren’t exactly super-common either, which is why Schultz hopes fruit lovers in other cities might be inspired to replicate Fruit Rescue and ForestR’s model.

My own Tuesday morning fruit expedition ended at another backyard orchard in Martinez. There, a single large apple tree had at least three different varieties of apples grafted onto it, including a crop of Pink Ladies that were wonderfully crisp and tart straight off the tree.

The final tally for a couple of hours of work? 974 pounds of apples and pears, all donated to Concord’s White Pony Express, whose food rescue program distributes the surplus fruit to food pantries and other nonprofit service providers across the region.

In the end, Schultz says, the bottom-line goal is simple: “To get the fruit and then get it to someone who can use it.”

Contra Costa Fruit Rescue posts upcoming gleaning events on its website and Eventbrite page. Right now, mostly pears and apples are being harvested, including events in Walnut Creek and on Bethel Island on Saturday, Aug. 30, and one in Lamorinda on Sunday, Aug. 31. On Saturday, Sept. 6, Fruit Rescue will harvest several backyard orchards in the Pleasanton/San Ramon/Danville area. Fill out this online form to register your own fruit tree(s) to be gleaned.

ForestR will be at the Castro Valley Fall Festival on Sept. 6 and 7, where it will give away fruit and sell homemade jams made from the gleaned fruit.