Urban Homesteading: Harvesting Fruit From The Neighborhood

Aimee in an apple tree

What is an urban homesteader to do if she can’t fill her entire yard with every kind of fruit tree there is? Urban harvesting is the answer!

In short, urban harvesting involves picking greens and fruits (and maybe even vegetables) from public and private lands. It’s not too early to start looking for where this free and abundant, and often overlooked, food source is growing.

One of the first foods we harvested was stinging nettles. My husband Jeremy found an enormous patch of them at a park near where he worked. He went to work one day prepared with plastic bags and rubber gloves. Stinging nettles do sting! But, they are also very healthy. The leaves are high in nutrients such as vitamins A, C, D, iron, potassium, manganese, and calcium and they can be used in place of spinach or other greens in many recipes. You just have to blanch, boil, or cook them a bit and they are perfectly safe to eat. You can also soak the leaves in water for 24 hours then use the water as an organic pesticide.

Our dandelions in the Midwest are just starting to come up – I’m sure yours in the Northwest have been coming up for months. Some people love dandelion greens in salad. I’m not a big fan – but I encourage you to experiment with this very abundant green.

apples galore

We’ve also discovered blackberries and raspberries by roadsides and bike paths and harvested a few of those.

The most abundant free-fruit source for us has been neighbors, friends, and strangers who are overwhelmed and more than happy for us to pick as much fruit as we can.

Two years ago we went out for dinner and then a casual stroll through the neighborhood. A few blocks from the restaurant we walked by a house with two weighted down apple trees: a crabapple tree and a regular apple. Jeremy boldly marched up to the door, knocked, and asked the owners if they were planning to pick their apples. It was clear they weren’t since it was mid-September and there were rotting windfall apples strewn all over the yard and street. The people welcomed us to pick as many apples as we could so we came back the next morning with two ladders and a pile of crates and bags.

In about two hours of picking we came away with over 50 pounds of regular apples and probably the same amount of crab apples (we forgot to weigh them). We made dozens and dozens of jars of crab apple jelly, apple pies, apple juice, apple crisp, and I can’t remember what else.

Aimee in a plum tree

We were sold on urban harvesting and soon acquired permission to help ourselves to the entire crop of crab apples from our neighbor two doors down and the whole crop of apples from our neighbor across the street.  We got to harvest raspberries and currants from another neighbor across the street. Jeremy knocked on another stranger’s door to get permission to pick some elderberries we found. We discovered peach and cherry trees in our neighborhood and then a friend offered us plums from their trees. We picked 22 pounds of delicious, sweet plums.

Now’s the time to scope out the fruit trees in your neighborhood and be ready in the autumn to ask your neighbors if you can pick the fruit.

Some organizations have started up that match willing harvesters with folks who have unpicked fruit-trees. If you don’t have such an organization in your area, you can try Neighborhood Fruit, which is a national organization.

About the author: Aimee McAdams grew up in the Northwest and now lives in the fair city of Minneapolis. From building raised beds and root cellars to keeping chickens and making preserves, Aimee and her husband Jeremy are experimenting with all things urban agriculture. She writes the blog Adventures in Urban Homesteading. Contact her at aimee.mcadams@yahoo.com.

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