Harvesting the Suburbs

“Knock, knock.”

There's a short wait and then an older lady shuffles to the door.

I introduce us. “I'm Kate and this is Lucy-Anne and her child Mathew, and we both live down the other end of the street.” The security screen is open now.

“We've been admiring your olive tree,” I start.

“Such plump, juicy fruit,” my neighbour Lucy-Anne adds, getting to the point.

A few days before I'm in my neighbour's kitchen and she is telling me it's walnut season and there's a walnut tree around the corner. “We should do like your friend does,” she suggests.

I must have told her about Neesh. Neesh started the Western Urban Harvest Swap-Meet I go to once a month. She likes to harvest the bounty of the suburbs. If she sees fruit rotting under your tree, she quite reasonably thinks the fruit might be surplus and feels comfortable knocking on your door to ask if she can harvest it. Then she'll cycle around her neighbourhood distributing what she's picked to friends, family and people in need. That way a local resource doesn't go to waste, you see.

It sounds great. I think some day I'd like to do that too.

Now I'm discussing doing it with my neighbour, who grins and says confidently “I've got more front than Myer.” It sounds easy. So how come I'm the one thrust forward to knock on the door? She says “I don't know what you call what we want to do.”

Neesh says most people are receptive to her request. How will this lady react? Will she mind, think I am presumptuous? Will she decline to let us pick her olives because she needs more and make me feel bad about asking in the first place? Or decline because she's litigation conscious (modernity's spoiler)?

She replies “I've picked enough for my sister and me already. You can help yourselves. Have you preserved olives before?” And that's the start of a good ol'chat with our neighbour Helen. Aaahhh, nice one.

Now Lucy-Anne and I are planning for any surplus of other bearing trees in our neighbourhood: walnuts, feijoa, pomegranite and lemons this season. On the basis of this limited experience, I think the trick is catching people at home to ask them.