For years, CanDo volunteers noticed with dismay the amount of fruit on backyard trees around Napa that isn’t harvested and instead just falls and rots on the ground. We know that home gardens can overproduce veggies as well. In 2020, working with the CANV Food Bank, we started CanDo’s Gleaning Project.

If you have, or know someone who has, more fruit or veggies than you or they can use, contact us. We receive many requests to glean. If you can, please contact us before the fruit is ripe so we have time to gather our volunteer gleaners! We also have some special volunteer jobs:
• someone with a truck or van to haul ladders
• someone to manage our spreadsheet

There are two ways to participate in this important project:
• as a donor (you have too many oranges or tomatoes or cucumbers, etc., in your garden). Complete this online form, or contact us by email.
• as a gleaner (you’d love to join our friendly crew as an on-call harvester). Contact us by email.

Since we started this project in 2020, our volunteer gleaners have completed more than 100 gleans and rescued over 35,000 pounds of ripe produce, all donated to the CANV Food Bank for distribution.

Our email address: gleaners@nvcando.org.