As she hid from the brutal sun behind a chicken coop Sunday, Dana Miller pulled a thick wad of paper out of her back pocket. Unfolding it, she cleared her throat.
“Why is it so difficult to work at an apple pie factory?” she asked, looking up, prompting a guess.
“The high turnover rate.”
As she kept reading apple puns from her notes, it became apparent that she had more than enough to go around.
Luckily for her, she was at ApplePalooza — an event to celebrate Grow Local Colorado’s annual glean, or harvest, and the perfect place for her arboreal tight five.
More than 125 volunteers with Grow Local Colorado saddled up over the weekend to pick apples from urban trees
Grow Local Colorado embarks on an annual quest to gather excess fruit from trees in local yards and donate them to food access organizations.
Last year, the volunteer group picked about 10,000 pounds of food across several gleaning sessions. This year, they wanted to do a bulk of the gleaning during a one-day blitz on Saturday.
“[Volunteers] picked 3,077 pounds of food,” Barbara Masoner, co-director of Grow Local Colorado, said. “That's 48,000 servings for kids or 12,000 servings for adults. It is a lot of food.”
The apples — picked from just 28 highly prolific trees across 12 Denver neighborhoods — were sorted into three categories.
The first — aptly named “firsts” — have no blemishes on them and are donated to organizations addressing food insecurity, like Denver Food Rescue, Fresh Food Connect and We Don’t Waste.
“One in 10 Coloradans, and one in seven children, is food insecure,” Masoner said. “This healthy food is so important.”
Seconds, which aren’t counted among the 3,077 pounds of apples Grow Local Colorado reported, are set aside to become sweet treats at ApplePalooza. Thirds are inedible by human standards and given to a local farmer to use for feed.
ApplePalooza is also about growing community around food
Glean volunteers have gathered informally in years past at Diana Bray’s backyard in Englewood to celebrate the harvest.
This year, they scaled up the celebrations and opened it up to the public.
“This is about harvesting food that would otherwise go to waste. So that's the obvious part of it, but the more emotional kind of side of it is the community coming together and doing this,” said Miller, the co-founder of Grow Local Colorado.
Musicians came and played songs about fruit. Kids were invited to write poetry about apples and hang it on a tree. Underneath a tent, there was a potluck of food that centered around apples, including apple scones, autumn salads and of course, apple pie.
In one corner, a handful of people took blemished apples and chopped them up, searching for worms or other things that could render them inedible. If they passed the inspection, they moved along to the grinder, the first step of making cider, the purest form of apple juice.
After the apples get grinded down, it goes into one of two cider presses. Joe Fleener, a self-described cider man, was visibly sweating after several rounds on the manual hand-cranked press, but refreshed himself on glasses of the mystery-mix cider.
“That's the way we do it,” Fleener said. “Other people might be a little bit more purist because there are apples that's specifically grown for cider. I don't know what [the apples we’re using] are. And nobody in the city knows what apples they have on their lawn.”
Pam Clifton wasn’t at the gleaning blitz on Saturday, but she brought a friend along to ApplePalooza anyways. She admitted that she wanted the benefits of the harvest without having to put in the work.
But after a few hours at the gathering, she said she’s ready to volunteer next year.
“I am going to put in my gleaning hours for my food next year. Yes, I'm committed,” Clifton said. “I'm going to start practicing climbing trees right now.”
There’s still more gleaning to be done this season
Grow Local Colorado’s gleaning season will continue over the next couple weeks. But if you’re the owner of a prolific tree in need of a gleaning, Masoner said they’re booked up for the next three weeks.
But you still have an opportunity to build community without Grow Local’s help.
“If you put out word to your friends and family, if you put out word on social media to your neighborhood and say, I've got lots of apples, everything that I've seen posted online, people come and they want this,” she said.
Editor's note: This article was updated to include the correct number of volunteers who gleaned for Grow Local Colorado.
