Foraging for Free Fruit - and making yummy stuff with it

I recently found the Falling Fruit website (they also have a mobile app, which I've known about for a while), which is a crowd-sourced interactive map of edible things that are accessible to foragers and gleaners. Falling Fruit itself is a non-profit organization and they describe themselves:

Falling Fruit is a celebration of the overlooked culinary bounty of our city streets. By quantifying this resource on an interactive map, we hope to facilitate intimate connections between people, food, and the natural organisms growing in our neighborhoods. Not just a free lunch! Foraging in the 21st century is an opportunity for urban exploration, to fight the scourge of stained sidewalks, and to reconnect with the botanical origins of food.

Many edible things grow in California. I know MANY people who have citrus trees in their yard or accessible in their neighborhoods. There are also lots of fruit trees in business parking lots, or in tree lawns next to roads. In most jurisdictions, any fruit that hangs over a sidewalk or other public thoroughfare is legally free to the world (check your area's laws -- IANAL!), and in many places the property owner or business is willing to let foragers/gleaners come onto their property and take the fruit -- this is especially true if you ask nicely and offer to share it with them. NOTE: some people have their own plans for their fruit, so remember Wheaton's Law and "Don't Be A Dick"™about it. 

It all started last week, when Bri & I stopped by the church to drop something off. When I got out of the car, I noticed a bunch of fruit on the ground under the decorative trees in the parking lot. They were sour cherries! I got an empty box from inside the church and we picked a few pounds of cherries from the lower branches of two trees -- and there are several more trees in and around the parking lot, so there's plenty more fruit for the birds and any other foragers/gleaners in the area. I've been making sour cherry syrup, jelly, and butter with the fruit -- I'll publish another post with more details about that, as I learned a few things along the way & don't want to forget!

Then on Saturday, on the way back from Synod Assembly in Palm Desert, Pastor Matt dropped me off at Bri's Amazon facility so I could ride back home with her. There were still a few hours until she got off work, so I drove over to the local library to hang out for a while. On the way back to AMZ, I passed a big citrus grove. There were "Private Property - No Tresspassing" signs up, but several of the trees were either outside the fence, or had heavily-laden branches that hung out over the road, so those are fair game. Plus, to be honest, I think it's an abandoned grove, as there were old tires lying around and SO MUCH FRUIT on the ground -- I don't think anybody is tending the grove anymore. It's in an area zoned for light industrial, so the property is probably just waiting to be developed. Such a shame for all that fruit to be wasted, but I can only take so much with me.

It was after finding this grove that I remembered the Falling Fruit website. I subsequently posted the grove onto the map for others to find.

After church on Sunday, the ever-patient Brianne and I went on a drive to some of the sites that were in the high desert. We went to a fig tree in Hesperia that had a LOT of unripe fruit on it. It has several branches that hang over the sidewalk, so I'm planning to keep my eye on it and hope to get some fruit from it in the near future.

Then we drove out to a nearby reservoir where there were several Hollyleaf Cherry plants on a publicly-accessible hillside. They're still flowering, so we'll go back later once the plants set fruit.

On Monday, we had some errands to run down the hill. Falling Fruit showed some nearby fruit trees, so we went to check them out, too. There was a lemon tree that the map said was out in the open with no fence or anything, but we found it was in somebody's yard and was trimmed so that nothing hung out over the sidewalk, so we left it alone. However, as we drove down the road a bit further, we found a guy trimming an orange tree -- there were a bunch of branches with fruit on the ground all around him, so I stopped and asked if I could have the fruit. He said yes -- and I got more than a dozen oranges!

On the way to another tree in the area, we passed a business that had a big fruit tree out in front of their parking lot, overhanging the sidewalk, so I asked Bri to make a U-turn (OK, it was more like, "OMG, turn around! There's a big fruit tree back there!!"). It was a big loquat tree! I took some fruit from the sidewalk side of the tree, then went inside the business to ask them if I could pick some fruit from the parking lot side, and they said yes! I also added this tree to the Falling Fruit map.

After that, we continued on to the tree we were actually looking for when we saw the loquats. This tree was a mulberry tree which I was excited about because I'd never seen mulberries before. The fruit had mostly fallen off the tree and was spread out on the ground and on the sidewalk. I managed to only get about a handful of unblemished fruit. I'll try to get back there earlier next year and hope to get some more usable fruit. For now, I'll probably combine the mulberries in with the loquats when I make some jam or whatever from them.

Closer to home, the prickly pear cactuses are starting to bloom! They didn't bloom very much last year or the year before because it was so dry, but this winter was so wet that they are blooming like gangbusters now (and it's still raining occasionally, which also helps). It promises to be a good year for prickly pear fruit! They ripen later in the year, so I'll keep my eye on them and try to get to them before the birds do, LOL. We have a number of them on our property, including a couple right up next to the road which stick out of our fence and so are publicly-accessible. There's also a big bunch of them along a nearby road. I added both ours and the others to the Falling Fruit map, along with several juniper bushes that are just about everywhere around here. (Juniper berries are excellent for cooking. I like to use them in mustards and in fermented sauerkraut.)

Anyway, that's just what we've found in the past few days. I'll be down in San Diego County this coming weekend and will check the map to see what I can find down there.

PS. the juniper bushes on our property are COVERED in berries!