High school chemistry teacher Stacey Falls started the Santa Cruz Fruit Tree Project with her husband Steve Schnaar four years ago, to help locals deal with excess fruit in their yard and show them how to dry cure and preserve harvests. “Since Steve and I started the Fruit Tree Project, we really haven’t bought much fruit at all,” Falls says, “and he eats fruit!”
High school chemistry teacher Stacey Falls started the Santa Cruz Fruit Tree Project with her husband Steve Schnaar four years ago, to help locals deal with excess fruit in their yard and show them how to dry cure and preserve harvests. “Since Steve and I started the Fruit Tree Project, we really haven’t bought much fruit at all,” Falls says, “and he eats fruit!” Falls says Schnaar eats about three pieces of fruit each morning before breakfast. Schnaar and Falls are also putting on the second annual DIYine festival this Saturday night at 6pm at the Museum of Art and History.
SCW: What will be your favorite drink at DIYine?
Stacey Falls: Last year the plum port knocked my socks off. And then there’s this guy Randy—who’s a hobbyist, but he does semi-pro fruit wines called Freedom Wine Works, and his stuff is amazing. Last year he had strawberry wine and persimmon wine and blackberry wine.
How did the Fruit Tree Project start?
We would see people who had more fruit than they could possibly handle. And I’d always be embarrassed because Steve would run up to their door and say, “Hey! Can we have some of that?” Most people were ecstatic about giving their fruit away, because if you’re a single-family home and you have an apple tree, you probably have more apples than you can handle. You end up putting them in a Greenwaste container, worrying about rats and raccoons. All the while, somebody down the street is going to Safeway and buying apples from Washington. When your apples are done, you’re buying oranges. Even though your neighbor down the street is having the same problem with oranges!
Isn’t farming something that’s supposed to happen out in the country?
It is interesting that we think of farming as these big fields, but maybe a more sustainable model would include fruit and nut trees—if there were lots of these ecological plots everywhere.
What’s the best fruit to dry?
We dry permissions every year, and I have to say those. I don’t really like persimmons if they’re not dry. I like drying plums and putting them in my oatmeal. I like figs better when they’re dry. And dried pears are like candy.
Yeah, fresh figs look like aliens when you bite into them.
You know, it’s not a fruit. It’s a flower [that] co-evolved with a hornet with a really long proboscis that pollinates it by sticking it down.
