Tree Harvest
Share your fruit with the community.
Have a fruit tree that produces more than you can use? We can send over a team of fruit pickers to harvest your tree, and split the harvest three ways – ⅓ is offered to you, ⅓ is shared amongst the volunteers, and ⅓ is delivered to a social service agency in your community.
Tree Registrant Membership
To grow and sustain Toronto’s fruit harvest, we ask Tree Registrants to become a member and contribute $40 per harvest to cover the costs of the harvest and support the expansion of our program. While picking, we also clean your yard of fallen fruit! Membership expires on January 1st every year.
Where We Pick
We operate in Toronto’s downtown core: south of Eglinton, east of Jane, west of Victoria Park, and north of the waterfront; as well, in Etobicoke (Royal York, The Gardiner and Dundas) and Scarborough (Birchmount, St. Clair East, to the Bluffs).
Your Impact
By sharing your bounty with NFFTT, you make an impact directly in your community. Your yard becomes a hotbed for community connection, bringing people from all walks of life together to enjoy the bounty! Together, these agencies feed over thousands of people monthly and incorporate your fruit into meals for their clients.
Step 1: Register Your Tree
First things first – sign up on our online portal and provide us with some basic information about your fruit tree(s).
Step 2: Request a Pick
About two weeks before your fruit is ripe, request a pick on the Portal. We will scout your tree to determine its suitability. If it’s a match, one of our Pick Leaders will get in touch to schedule a pick and we’ll charge you $40 after the harvest. If we don’t schedule a pick, you won’t get charged.
Frequently asked questions
Nope! Only if you must be home to give us access to your yard. We’ll take care of your property and leave everything as we found it.
Fruit picks last for a maximum of two hours. Sometimes there’s so much fruit our volunteers can’t get it all in two hours. If that’s the case, you can always request another pick, and we’ll do our best to return as soon as we can.
We get hundreds of harvest requests from across the city in just a few short months. All picks are run by our amazingly dedicated volunteers and small team of staff, and while we’ll try our best to find a group for your tree, sometimes we just can’t meet every request. To help us grow our capacity, please consider becoming a Pick Leader, or making a donation to support the expansion of our program.
We pick as much as we can in two hours but keep in mind our volunteers aren’t professional arborists. Sometimes we can’t quite get every single fruit – especially if your tree is a tall one.
Because our volunteer leaders arrive via cargo bike, unfortunately they can’t carry a ladder to the pick. If your tree is tall, please do your best to provide a ladder so volunteers can pick as much fruit as possible. If you don’t own one, we encourage you to borrow from a neighbour or the Toronto Tool Library.
If either you or the Pick Leader cancels the pick, it is your responsibility to indicate to us that you would like to reschedule. You must sign into your profile on the Portal to cancel or re-schedule your pick for a later date. Please do so at least 24 hours before your pick so we have time to notify the volunteer fruit pickers.
Unfortunately, this does happen from time to time. With some fruits (especially cherries and berries), there’s a very short time window between them being ripe and them falling off the branches. Birds, squirrels, or raccoons may have also beaten us to the fruit. Whatever the case, please cancel your pick on the Portal, and we’ll hope for better luck next season!
We have some basic criteria: your tree needs to be in our operating area, has one of the types of fruit we harvest, has fruit that is no higher than 25 feet off the ground, is healthy, and is in a safe and accessible space.
If your tree is taller than 25, or if the fruit is simply at the top, we can’t reach it. The birds will get we can’t!
We do our best to schedule as many quality experiences as our capacity allows. We try to scout trees in advance so we can understand the quality of the fruit and how accessible the tree is. Sometimes trees are registered after the fruit is in its prime or the trees are simply too tall or the fruit is out of reach. Sometimes the demand exceeds our volunteer capacity. For these reasons we aren’t able to promise anything, but we really do hope we can come! We always appreciate that people want to share their trees with us.
Beautiful abundance! We would usually love to come and do a second pick when there is a plentiful amount of fruit that would be in great quality and quantity by the time we return. We can’t guarantee that we have the capacity to do a second pick, but we will do our best to let you know.
We charge $40 per pick. If we come back from a second harvest, we will charge your account a second time. In other words, two picks = $80.
No, we are not a yard cleanup service. We expect Tree Registrants to have a reasonably clean and safe space for our teams to operate in. We will always lightly clean up around the tree for health and safety reasons and we’re happy to do that. However, we reserve the right to decide that a yard is in unsuitable condition and exceeds a respectful amount of tidying and we will decline or terminate the pick. If you don’t feel comfortable hanging out with a bunch of wasps and mouldy fruit, neither do we!
Fruit Ripening Timeline
