Though our house came with a well-worn orchard ladder and an apple picker, the deer and the crows got most of the produce from our fruit trees the first year we lived here. So when a friend told us about the Port Townsend Gleaners, we contacted them right away. Kathy Darrow stopped by several times for ripeness checks, and when the apples were ready she showed up with a team of pickers and they were done in no time at all. We were thrilled with the service they provided; thrilled, also, to know our apples were both going to the homeless and being turned into applesauce to be used in our school cafeterias.

But that turns out to be a massive undertaking. Though Quimper Community Harvest (also known as PT Gleaners, part of foodbankgrowers.org) has been gleaning excess fruit from local trees since 2008, the production of applesauce has only been happening since 2020. In the past, they sorted the higher-grade fruit to serve fresh at schools, senior facilities and food banks in our community, but the lower-grade apples were either pressed into juice or left on the trees. 

But in 2020 the Gleaners piloted a project to turn unwanted ‘ugly’ apples into applesauce for the public schools. That first year they generated enough applesauce to be served in school meals all year, but the process was complex and chaotic. In 2021 they solicited funds to purchase a pump, and built a heat exchanger (designed by one of their crew, Jim Moore) that would cool the hot sauce using only tap water before containers went into the freezer.

Using this new system and with practice, these hard-working food providers have learned how to manage the water-to-sauce ratio to provide just enough "flow" to get the applesauce through the heat exchanger without losing its spoonable character -- and what was a initially a study in chaos management has matured into a zen-like flow of work. 

In this, the fourth year that the Glean Team has picked, sorted, washed, chipped, cooked, and frozen the sauce, 15 volunteers spent 11 hours in the Blue Heron kitchen, hosted by school cook Bobi Beery, and turned 2,600 pounds of apples into 1,600 pounds of sauce, all stored in three-gallon tubs to be defrosted throughout the winter -- and this is in addition to all the “good” apples being served fresh at our schools, senior centers and food banks.

A huge thanks to Seth Rolland and the PT Gleaners, who pick literally tons of apples in order to bring great-tasting, nutritious food to our most vulnerable community members. Not only are they decreasing food waste, but they are expanding community well-being, and building resilience into our local food system.

For information on adding your tree to the gleaning cycle or volunteering to become a gleaner, visit http://foodbankgrowers.org.