Joni Diserens Quotations

The thing that shocks you is how much fruit is in one tree. Once we picked 400 pounds from one apple tree - we couldn't even fit into the car.

When the participants told me they couldn't find anything to can, I told them to go out and identify different kinds of fruit trees in their own neighborhoods. When people found out we were doing this, they started to call me at home, saying, 'Please come harvest our fruit tree. We'd love to give people the fruit.' Pretty soon, I had 50 names.

We go all year around because we have the luxury of ongoing harvests.

Our biggest challenge now is funding the program with the growth we're seeing. There's a lot of fruit to be harvested out there.

But we're getting a good response from Berkeley homeowners, so we'll see how it goes. We'll experiment, perhaps in the Fruitvale area in Oakland, or Vacaville. We want to see if it's more fruitful, if you will, to spend our efforts there.

We've had a lot of interest in Alameda County from agencies feeding the hungry. They want more produce, and there's a lot of backyard fruit not being harvested.