Beginning with luscious cherries in June and finishing up with tart kiwi fruit in December, the Port Townsend Gleaners enjoyed another successful season harvesting and delivering fresh, locally grown fruit to the community.

Thanks to the generosity of more than 250 tree stewards and the abundance of hundreds of trees, we delivered nearly six tons of fruit to twenty organizations this year. 

Local farmers also offered their produce to PT Gleaners, allowing us to harvest and deliver fresh blueberries from Gray Fox Farm in Chimacum and bushels of ripe tomatoes, green beans and squash from the Morgan family in Port Townsend. 

The Port Townsend Gleaners are also known as Quimper Community Harvest, part of the Local 20/20 Local Food Action Group. Several dozen people, ranging from ages 3 to 93, make up the all-volunteer crew of PT Gleaners, which has been contributing fresh food to the community since 2008. 

Since then, the team has also facilitated the creation and management of an orchard at Blue Heron Middle School, where hundreds of students participate in caring for and harvesting from more than a dozen varieties of fruit trees, including figs, plums, apples and pears. 

During the especially abundant 2020 gleaning season (more than 18,000 pounds of fruit harvested!), the applesauce project was born. 

“Throughout the season, we have a lot of fruit that is not so pretty, but still delicious and nutritious. Making applesauce is one way we can process and store a lot of fruit that would otherwise be wasted,” says co-coordinator Seth Rolland. 

Gleaning queen Laurie Levites led the first year’s effort, which yielded loads of applesauce over a six-week period. 

This year we improved the process by adding a specially engineered food-grade pump to the production line. With funds raised from 85 generous donors, the pump was purchased this fall. 

Gleaning team member and master MacGyver Jim Moore engineered an elaborate array of pipes and hoses to create a heat exchanger that makes it possible to cool the sauce more quickly.

“Remarkably, after three prototypes, a year of work and thought, and many seemingly impossible challenges, the pump and cooling system does exactly what we need it to do. We are now able to take fresh hot applesauce from 140 degrees to 58 degrees in 5 minutes using only tap water as the coolant,” explains Rolland. 

Combined with a food grade apple chipper affectionately named “Chip” and an Italian pulp separator named “Fabio,” a crew of 10 people processed more than 900 pounds of apples in one day to make 700 pounds (about 70 gallons) of applesauce, now being stored in the Port Townsend School kitchen freezer. The applesauce will be offered to local schools and other organizations to serve simply as sauce or baked into other tasty treats from now until next season. 

Much gratitude to the hundreds of folks who continue to make the Port Townsend Gleaners program a success. Most of all, we are grateful for the beautiful trees, vines and shrubs that give so generously year after year. 

For more information about PT Gleaners or to join our team as a tree/farm owner or harvester, visit l2020.org or email us at ptgleaning@gmail.com. 

Many thanks from the Port Townsend Gleaner Co-coordinators; Seth Rolland, Suzanne Wilson, Gabrielle Vanwert, Kathy Darrow, and Mary Hunt.