EXPERIENCE
UP A TREE A
lyrical dee-dum signals a new email. It’s from Not Far From The Tree (a Toronto-based fruit picking and sharing organization) announcing another fruit pick. I’ve signed up as a volunteer to get a first-hand look at all the ignored fruit in the city. Someone else’s discards have become treasures to this band of fruit hunters. We’re after free, locally grown, probably pesticide-free fruit. There are plenty of heritage trees in the city and plenty of people who want to pick them. The stumbling block is the infrastructure and costs required to connect the two. I’m curious to see who these people are and whether it’s really the fruit they are after. I head up the asphalt driveway, carefully pushing my bike past a parked car and toe down the kickstand in front of the garage. Alison Smith meets me by the back door, buttoning her pea coat as she steps out. We sit together on an iron bench and I explain my project, how we’ve lost the knowledge about what to do with fruit trees. “I fit right into that category,” Alison shrugs. “I don’t know how to identify them.” Her apple tree reaches the eavestrough. It is laden with fruit, plenty of it half-eaten by raccoons and squirrels. “Honestly I’m not sure our apples are OK,” Alison says, adding that years ago she picked some for a pie but the experience left her wanting. “They’re tiny, so it’s really hard to cut them up and core them.
They’re super hard and super sour, so I had to add a lot of sugar. The pie was decent, but it seemed like three times more work than just buying apples from the grocery store.” The apples on the ground don’t match the oversized fruits we picked at the one-hundred-acre pick-your-own apple farm the weekend previous or most of the fruit I find in grocery stores. These ones are freckled with brown spots and the surfaces are uneven. “There’s not a lot of meat from these guys,” Alison says, flipping a hand at the animals’ leftovers, “so that was my one pie.” But she remembers it. Toward the end of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan prepares a dinner from food made entirely from meat, vegetables and fruit he has harvested himself. He knows it’s not practical for every day but, he writes, “no meal I’ve ever prepared or eaten has been more real.” That pie Alison made would have been all the more pleasurable, knowing the work it took to produce it. Alison didn’t plant the tree. It was here when she and her husband bought the house in the late ’90s from a couple who must have loved gardening. But, judging by the tree’s height and Alison’s recollection of that couple’s age, they wouldn’t have planted it either. So three families have watched it grow, I say, asking her what was here when they moved in. “The apple tree was here; there was a cherry tree in front of the shed.” She hesitates, drawing a breath and bracing
TORONTOBOTANICALGARDEN.CA
14
FALL 2019
PHOTOS: COURTESY HELENA MONCRIEFF
Author Helena Moncrieff gets to the core of the urban orchard with a venture into a backyard apple harvest.
