Seattle is a fruit-filled city. City parks feature old orchards and fruit trees line the sidewalks in many neighborhoods. I’m a huge fan of edible plants in public spaces. But it is painful to witness so much good fruit dropping to the ground. I have to exercise a lot of self-restraint when the tree is on someone else’s property and a little internal voice says, “Save the fruit!”.

This is why I love the vision of City Fruit, an organization that I’ve volunteered with for several years. People who cannot use all the fruit on their trees call City Fruit who picks and donates the harvest to food banks and school programs.

Mark and I are always happy to do our part to help save the fruit when coworkers and friends sound the alarm that they have more than they can use. I love the frantic challenge of figuring out what do with with a ton of produce that we have to use RIGHT NOW. We’ve made some awesome batches of apple sauce and plum granita.

Until this year I’ve relied on freezing as my primary preservation method. I’ve contemplated canning but was a little nervous. My public health training makes it hard to ignore another voice in my head that warns, “Botulism!”

Last weekend we were lucky enough to visit friends who recently retired to a beautiful rural home with 40 fruit trees. They told us we’d need to do our part in helping them harvest when we visited.

In addition to filling bags with plums, apples, and pears, we also had enough time to get a hands on canning course with a great cook and a molecular biologist. We couldn’t have asked for a better teaching team to help us can plum chutney. 

I hadn’t thought through how important it would be to get the timing right. The chutney needed to thicken just as jars were sterilized, and the water was boiling for the canning process. I’m glad we had four sets of hands and years of experience on our team.

We taste tested the chutney as we cleaned the pot – yum! It should get even better as the flavors meld. I’m already looking forward to opening up the jars filled with summer fruit when it’s rainy and gray outside.