Our neighborhood like many of yours is full of vacant foreclosed houses. Many of these houses have fruit trees, and I'm not shy of saving that fruit from the roof rats. Here in Phoenix right now the daytime temps are around 70 and the lows are around 50. (Today was a beautiful 80 degree day!)With this kind of weather, November is one of our best times for harvesting. Today in addition to all I picked from home, I grabbed a big basket and went for a walk around the block. Our first stop is a house around the corner that has a big pecan tree in the front yard that reaches right up to the street. We always stop there and get pecans that are in the public right of way, people live here (though I doubt they harvest many of their pecans from what I've observed) so I don't get too grabby or go up into their yard. A few houses down from that is an empty house with a giant pomegranate tree out front so we hit that up with our citrus picker. Then around the next corner and halfway back to our house is a foreclosed house with no gate separating the front and back yard. The backyard has a huge lemon tree with hundreds of lemons on it. We got some. :)
There are also mulberries and a recently discovered fig tree (ripe at different times of the year) in vacant housing or in the public walkway in the neighborhood. I only know of one other neighbor that bothers to pick any...
So here is a picture of most of today's harvest, everything not mentioned above came from our front and back yard. I even canned some dilly beans (like a dill pickle, but using a green bean instead of a cucumber) from our beans.
Do you have anything to forage for in your neighborhood?
3 comments:
Hi Rachel, Nice Harvest! Pecans are one of my fav nuts next to pistachios and macadamias! Nice foraging! I find limes in people's front yards and lemons. I'll nab them if they have fallen off the tree and they are not damaged.
Not many of our neighbors have edibles, and the ones who do pick their own. However, we have tons of blackberry bushes around here that we load up on every fall (they make wonderful jam!) And there are some local farms in the area that let you glean when they're done harvesting (typically strawberries and raspberries). If we head into the forest, we can get wild blueberries and huckleberries.
I love the concept of your garden expanding into the neighborhood. Nice harvest. Not much to forage here in the Hudson Valley, but do still have Kale, frozen, in the garden and Swiss Chard under plastic(hoping to overwinter it).
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