April 8th, 2010 by Lee Bradshaw

Over a decade ago I was in the backyard of someone that had hired the company that I was working for. We were putting on siding. It was a two-story house if I remember right in Sandy, Utah. It was mid September and the homeowner had a peach tree in the backyard that didn’t look like it had been harvested for years. At lunchtime I walked over to the end of the scaffolding that I had been working on and sat down right above the peach tree and picked me a peach.

Peaches have always been my favorite fruit. More that the taste I love the memories that flood my mind. In 1973 I was ten and we moved into a house that had a peach tree. I remember pruning and tending to that tree. In the spring we would pick half of the green peaches off so that the ones that remained would be as big as softballs in the fall. Every fall the first thing I would do as I arrived home would be to stop by that tree and look for the ripest peach. I would only pick one at a time because they were so big I could only eat one. Sometimes I would eat it in the shade. Other times I would take it into the kitchen and skin it and slice it up and eat it with cream.

What happened next seems innocent even now. I was working with a guy named James. James and I sat on that scaffolding and started talking about all the food that goes to waste in our own backyards. James said “ I think you would control one of the biggest orchards in the world if you could find a way to network all the people that have trees in their backyards”. That conversation has stayed with me for ever since. I have no aspirations to control all the fruit or even just peaches for that matter, but the fact that so much food is never harvested has haunted me since that day.

Shortly after that day James and I were driving down the road and I was telling him about gleaning fields and that I had heard that some farmers would let you harvest what was left after he had harvested it. We just happen to be driving along a farmer’s field and James pulled over and got out before I knew it he has walking though a field up to a farmer that happened to be standing close by. As I rushed up James was asking if we could glean his field. Our timing was unbelievable. He said that we could have the next week to take as much food as we wanted. At the end of the week he was going to till it all under for the winter.

We had every type of pepper you can imagine. We had squash, melons, tomatoes, etc. but over fourteen apple boxes of peppers if I remember correctly.

James is a great friend and he has taught me a lot though our conversations but those two things.

#1 Dream big- I was just looking for a free peach that day. A free lunch.

#2 Do it now!!! There is probably a reason it came to your mind now so do it now.

To be continued…