Sacramento Fruit Trees Under Quarantine for Oriental Fruit Fly

Bad news yesterday from Soil Born Farms that the city is under quarantine for Oriental fruit fly. This means the Harvest Sacramento program through Soil Born Farms will not happen this winter. Big bummer for many reasons. Harvest Sacramento is made up of volunteers who go to individual homes throughout the city of Sacramento, one neighborhood at a time, to pick fruit.  Yes, they pick all of your fruit, for example, so you don’t have to, but they do much more. Harvest Sacramento donates the fruit to charity to feed the hungry and they give you a tax deductible receipt.

We signed up for this program years ago when we discovered we don’t eat enough oranges to really justify an orange tree in our yard in Land Park. They are big, fat juicy naval oranges. But we are too lazy to make orange juice and we just don’t consume a lot of citrus.

Further, just for the record, we did not plant the orange tree. It was a young fledgling tree, still staked to prevent falling over when we bought the house.

One day it did fall over. I was shocked. Looking out our kitchen window, I witnessed a big tree that had fallen face first into the mud after a rain storm. Fearing it was dying, I ran out and staked it up again. Somehow, it survived and now it is mashing our fence, hanging over into the neighbor’s yard. Nobody likes it. But we keep fertilizing and allowing Harvest Sacramento to pick the oranges every winter.

The quarantine for oriental fruit fly means you can eat your own fruit but you cannot throw it away in green waste. If you need to dispose of your fruit, you need to double bag it in plastic bags and put it into your garbage.

Below is a map of the area under quarantine for Oriental fruit fly. The quarantine prohibits sharing or sales of fruit. For more information, call the California Food & Agriculture Pest Hotline at 800.499.1899.

Image: California Department of Food & Agriculture