This weekend, the Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard team of volunteers was out in full force! Our jobs included:
The team included Susan, Giselle, Leah, Rael, Zeny, Annie, Cliff and Laurence and two of our teenage volunteers.
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More than 25 people gathered in the Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard to harvest our two mature cherry trees. And with all those helpful hands we were able to harvest enough cherries to make multitudes of pies!
The team included many of the park’s regular volunteers including Susan, Gail, Zeny, Giselle, Leah, Annie, Harrison, Dan and Rebecca. But we also had lots of wonderful community members of all ages (including many hard-working children!) to help us harvest the cherry trees and share the bounty.
Our group has three extendable harvesting tools, and volunteer Sara loaned us her extendible harvester as well. And so that whole crew, including regular volunteers and visiting community members went about gathering as many of the ripe, red cherries as as possible.
Pruning or removing branches is NOT part of the work of harvesting and it’s not recommended for anyone not trained in fruit tree care. But Susan teaches fruit production and fruit tree pruning at Niagara College and online at OrchardPeople.com. And so she carefully and strategically removed some high-up branches to allow us to harvest even more fruit.
We gathered all the cherries in metal bowls and prepared to weigh the bounty before distributing the fruit…only to discover that our scale wasn’t working. So sadly, we can’t tell you how many pounds of cherries we picked!
But what we do know is that every participant had lots of cherries to take home and enjoy. And we also set aside a large share of the harvest to donate to the Glen Gardens Seniors Residence on Eglinton Avenue West for the residents to share during their summer barbecue and social.
If you came out to help, thank you! And we hope you enjoy the bounty! And if you didn’t make it this time, you can send an email to growingforgreen (at) gmail.com and ask us to add you to our community list and we will notify you about any future harvests.
Susan Poizner is one of the volunteers for The Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard in Toronto. She is the creator of the fruit tree care education website OrchardPeople.com. Susan is the author of four fruit tree care books including Grow Fruit Trees Fast: A Beginner’s Guide to a Healthy Harvest in Record Time. She is also the host of the Orchard People podcast and an ISA Certified Arborist.
There is a lot of work behind the scenes in the Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard where a handful of volunteers spend over 400 hours a year caring for the fruit trees and our pollinator garden.
The rewards are many…we spend time building community and we enjoy seeing the park look so beautiful. But one of the biggest treats is harvest time and right now the two large sweet cherry trees in the park are ripe and ready to be picked.
And so this weekend, Susan, Giselle, Zeny, Olivia and three of our teenage volunteers spent our Sunday morning working on renovating the pollinator garden. And after that we gathered at the cherry trees and started to harvest!
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