Food Waste Prevention Week has just drawn to a close. Depending on how you’ve gotten involved with Portland Fruit Tree Project— tree care, planting, harvesting, events, the list goes on— you may or may not know that PFTP first started with reducing food waste as a cornerstone of our mission. We continue to hold strongly to the knowledge that Portland’s canopy becomes an abundant source of food each growing season. The trick always seems to be making sure these resources get utilized! 

Every year Portland Fruit Tree Project puts out resources for organizing harvests with neighbors, plans and harvests thousands of pounds of fruit with volunteers, and partners with culturally specific community organizations to get this urban fruit to people who want to eat it. We take a holistic approach to cultivating abundance, offering resources and performing maintenance on Portland’s fruiting canopy year round to improve fruit quality, further reducing waste. (We all want to eat higher quality fruit, right?)

With fruit trees starting to bloom, pollinators buzzing, and fruit beginning to set, now is a great time to register your tree with us for this year’s harvest! You can also sign up to be a harvester or harvest lead now, so in a couple of months when those first cherries start to ripen, we’ll be all ready to keep food from the compost bin, and share the abundance with our neighbors.

Thanks to board member extraordinaire, Bobby Naughton for writing this!

More Resources:

Register a Tree

Become a PFTP Volunteer

DIY Harvest Kit