A lyrical dee-dum signals a new email. It’s from Not Far From The Tree announcing another fruit pick. There can’t be many left. Apples this time, and the location looks close. I head to the portal to the click-through process.

I’ve signed up as a volunteer to get a first-hand look at all the ignored fruit in the city. It seems like a simple thing to do. Volunteer to pick someone’s unwanted fruit and cart it away for them. But I’ve moved fast on several notices only to find that, within minutes, I’m ninth on the waiting list. A veteran told me she leaves the web page open when her favourite fruits are in season, refreshing every few minutes to catch the new listings first.

Someone else’s discards have become treasures to this band of fruit hunters. Supply and demand usually drive up prices — I think of the ubiquitous coloured Pyrex bowls of the ’50s, now a coveted find in vintage stores. But in this case, 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 feel like a young intern, competing for the experience of working for free. Of course, this won’t define my career, but I’m caught up in the chase and now I want to win.

The emails are always friendly. Still, when you’ve seen four of them in one day without success, the cheeriness gets a bit irksome. There are details about what to wear and how to cancel and then the closing, “Fruitfully Yours, Not Far From The Tree.”

Dundas and High Park is close enough. I could walk there. Sour apples. Would I use them? Throw in some sugar and make a sauce? There’s no time to consider the details. I click “accept.” I’m on the wait list. Darn. By the end of the day, my luck turns. I’m in.

The day of the pick arrives with gloomy skies and sweatshirt weather. The apple tree is just blocks away on my own street. I pedal up the road midafternoon past my old high school. The back field is empty today, grass scuffed from field hockey sticks and football cleats. As I ride past, I can picture heading onto the field again. But who am I kidding? I had let my fitness slide through the summer as I recovered from pneumonia. I can feel the results in my lungs and legs, even on this short trip uphill.

A minute later, I pull into the driveway of the secret address. A sugar maple shadows the third-floor windows, and pots of flowering plants line the stone steps to the porch. Over the past few decades I’ve done a lot of political canvassing and always enjoy doing “drops,” stuffing pamphlets or other campaign literature into mailboxes. You seldom meet anyone, so you can relax your persuasion skills and slip into a monk-like mindfulness. Pull the card from the bundle, lift the lid of the mailbox, drop, close and move on. You also get a lot of exercise moving from house to house, climbing stairs and searching for mailboxes. I try to imagine personality types from the clues left outside. Are the yards wild and natural or manicured and minimalist? Is the porch furniture carefully curated or is the space a jumble of children’s scooters and bikes? Does the aroma of bacon and coffee drift through the screen midmorning or are onions and garlic stewing for later?

Fruit picking brings me past the front door to the private sanctuary of the backyard. Before I started my quest, I spoke to Juby Lee, the project coordinator of Environment Hamilton’s Fruit Tree Project. Juby has been picking for years, harvesting fruit in the port city at the tip of Lake Ontario. Hamilton is well known for its steel industry, but it also has a lot of fruit. It’s on the edge of the soft fruit belt of Ontario and has a substantial Italian population — people who brought to Canada a tradition of homegrown produce. Part of Juby’s job is finding homeowners willing to open their back gates. She has a great appreciation for their generosity. “In this time of liability, when people could say ‘stay off my property,’ it’s a very sweet relationship,” she told me. “Here is a private space that you would never have access to and here’s a moment when the homeowner says ‘come on in.’”

As I wheel up to the address, Alison Smith opens the front door and I introduce myself. Although she and I
live on the same street, we’re too many blocks apart to have connected. But she does exactly what Juby celebrated. “Come on in,” she says.

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 meets me by the back door, buttoning her pea coat as she steps out.

Shielded by greenery from city noise and concrete, the yard must be an oasis after a long day at work. Alison works in communications for the provincial government and with her husband has teenaged children. We have a lot in common, so it’s not hard to imagine a Friday night barbecue on the flagstone patio, sitting under the vine-covered pergola. Perhaps the kids when younger would have played tag or run through a sprinkler on the lawn that spreads out behind the garage, mature trees shading them from the late-day sun.

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. Even the creatures create waste. I wonder what stops them from finishing or coming back to the same piece. “Honestly I’m not sure our apples are OK,” Alison says when I mention this, 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.”