Home&Real Estate
OPEN HOME GUIDE 74
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Home Front
DIVERSE SPRING TOUR ... Gamble Garden’s annual Spring Tour takes place Friday and Saturday, April 29 and 30, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at five gardens in Crescent Park and Old Palo Alto, with a theme of “Outdoor Living in Palo Alto — Fine Landscape Design for California Lifestyles.” Activities, food, music and shopping will take place at Gamble Garden, 1431 Waverley St., Palo Alto. Cost is $40. Information: 650-329-1356 or www. gamblegarden.org NEED TO SHRED? ... Palo Alto residents can bring up to five bankers’ boxes filled with confidential documents to shred at the Sunnyvale Materials Recovery and Transfer (SMaRT) Station, 301 Carl Road, Sunnyvale, on Saturday, April 30 from 8 a.m. to about noon. Documents must be removed from binders, but staples, paper clips, spiral notebooks and rubber bands are OK. Proof of residency is required. A SUMMER GARDEN ... Drew Harwell, edible-garden consultant and manager of Jesse Cool’s Seeds of Change Garden, will teach a class on “Starting Your Summer Garden” on Saturday, April 30, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. The class will deal with which plants thrive locally and how to grow them, including basil, chard, cucumbers and tomatoes to transplant, and seed varieties, such as corn, lettuce, squash, beans and carrots. Class includes a tour of Jesse Cool’s garden. Cost is $31. Information: 650493-6072 or www.commongroundinpaloalto.org or http://startingyoursummergarden.eventbrite.com/
When
life gives you lemons ...
SWAP PLANTS ... The Garden Club of Los Altos, along with Los Altos Recreation Department, is sponsoring a free garden exchange on Saturday, April 30, from 10 a.m. to noon at the Hillview Community Center parking lot, 97 Hillview Ave., Los Altos. No privets or invasive plants — but all others must be labeled for the free swap. Information: 650-906-1651
Locals make good use of surplus fruit by Karla Kane / photographs by Veronica Weber
A
CANDLE-MAKING ... Lori Stoia will teach a class on “Eco-Friendly Candle-Making” on Saturday, April 30, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Palo Alto High School, Room 103, 50 Embarcadero Road, Palo Alto. Cost is $48, plus a $20 materials fee collected in class. The class will deal with making a container candle, a rolled beeswax candle and votive candles, all made with natural waxes including soy. Information: 650-329-3752 or www. paadultschool.org PECHA KUCHA NIGHT ... Build It Green is sponsoring a networking night for designers, with a green, sustainable and holistic living theme. “Save the World in 20 Slides,” will be presented on Tuesday, May 3, from 5 to 7 p.m. at Harrell Remodeling, 1954 Old Middlefield Way, Mountain View. Pecha Kucha is derived from the Japanese word for “chit chat,” and (continued on page 60)
Members of the Stanford Gleaning Project, top, help pick lemons in front of the Kairos co-op housing building in April. Above, Among the pickers was Marshall Blundell.
yard full of fruit trees can offer fragrant blossoms, lovely looks and healthy snacks. But what to do when a yard is so, well, fruitful that you end up with more bounty than you and your neighbors can eat? Rather than letting it go to waste, one option is to donate the surplus fruit to organizations that feed the needy. Village Harvest is a local nonprofit that sends teams of volunteers into yards and orchards in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties to pick excess fruit for those who’ve signed up with the service. The nutritious fruit is then donated to nearby food banks and agencies. Village Harvest volunteers pick fruit in Palo Alto about once a month. Priority is given to locations with the largest abundance of fruit, types of fruit that can be
most useful to food banks, and residents who are physically unable to harvest the fruit themselves, volunteer Craig Diserens said. Palo Alto and its environs are home to a variety of fruit. Oranges, lemons and grapefruits are most common this time of year,
Austin Meyer places a freshly picked orange into one of the bags collected at Stanford, which will be donated to a San Francisco nonprofit.
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