Every year, thousands of pounds of fruit fall to the ground and rot. Homeowners who grow apples, plums, cherries, pears or other fruit often find that they can’t keep up with their fruit harvest, and they can only give away so much of their bounty to neighbors and co-workers.

The Seattle Times has a good story in today’s newspaper about a volunteer group called City Fruit that helps homeowners deal with the overabundance of fruit growing on their trees. City Fruit offers an added twist — helping homeowners better care for their fruit trees, including how to deal with worms, proper pruning and other tree tips. The Times writes:

City Fruit goes beyond harvesting by offering homeowners instruction in pruning, pest control and harvesting as well as workshops in canning or jam making. The organization also hopes to create a neighborhood network so that anyone seeking harvesting help or workshop information can consult its Web site for citywide options…

There are plenty of groups in Seattle that help homeowners harvest fruit and deliver them to food banks, so there’s no excuse for letting those juicy apples or pears fall to the ground and rot. Solid Ground, a nonprofit in Fremont, for example, runs the Community Fruit Tree Harvest. The group posts a list of food banks and other programs that will accept fruit in 2009 (PDF).  You can sign up as a volunteer to scout neighborhood fruit trees that can potentially be harvested, provide storage for fruit or picking buckets or be “on call” to harvest fruit in your neighborhood.  You can also organize your own harvest party and donate your fruit by calling Seattle Tilth’s Garden hotline at 206-633-0224 or email help@gardenhotline.org).

1. This is the month to enjoy the fruits of your labor in the garden. You get to harvest ripe vegetables, including tomatoes, zucchini, beans, cucumbers, and potatoes.

'sweet success' cucumber ready to be picked

2. Fertilize strawberries after harvesting for good fruit production next spring.

3. Feed, water, deadhead annuals. Continue to deadhead (remove spent flowers) on roses, Shasta daisies, coneflowers, cosmos and other plants. Lavender that has finished blooming can be cut back by about one-third.

4. Don’t forget to deep water trees and plants in containers during stretches of hot weather. August is typically a dry month with little rainfall. Plants in containers tend to dry out faster and need more water, so keep careful watch over them.

So your vegetable plants are growing luscious and green and are producing a fair amount of flowers, but for some reason you’re not getting fruit set. No pumpkins, squash, ears of corn or tomatoes. What’s going on? A key problem is pollination. Your plant either hasn’t been pollinated at all, or has been insufficiently pollinated.

Cucumbers, melons and squash have both male and female blossoms on the same plant (with the exception of some varieties). The female blossom must be pollinated by the male ones in order for fruit to set; only the female blossoms produce fruit. The first blossoms you’ll see are male (they have thin straight stems), to be followed by the female (usually further out on the vine, larger and have an undeveloped fruit at their base — it looks like a little bulbous thing). These plants rely on bees to pollinate. Bees do such important work in our vegetable gardens, so try to avoid insecticides where possible and plant flowers throughout to invite them into your garden. (See our earlier post on bee-friendly gardens).

If you have a lot of blossoms but no fruit, you can wait for the bees to do their thing, or you can take matters into your own hands. Here’s some advice from the Spokane County WSU extension program:

To hand pollinate vine crops, locate the male blossoms.  Break off several from the plant and peel back the petals.  Note the pollen on the inside of the blossom.  Gently push the pollen into the female blossoms with a paintbrush, a feather, or the male blossom itself.  This should insure a good crop.

There are a lot of great gardens to check out this Saturday at the Rainier Valley garden tour. It takes place Saturday, August 22, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets are $7 per person.

The tour includes highlights such as the Brandon Street Orchard, a former blackberry-ridden dumping ground has been turned into an urban oasis with plenty of fruit for all of the neighbors, and the Angel Morgan P-Patch & Sitting Park,. a year-round, multicultural, wheelchair-accessible garden with espalier fruit trees, berry patch, rock garden.

Learn about different kinds of cistern systems, how they work, and what cistern makes sense for you. Find out more about  honey bees from an expert, and see an example of good “dogscaping,” landscaping that takes into account your dog’s paths and lifestyle.

For anyone who has watched a tree being cut down in their neighborhood and bemoaned the loss of tree canopy, new regulations are underway in the city of Seattle to tighten the rules around tree-cutting. The exact specifics haven’t been ironed out yet — like whether a permit is required to cut down a tree — but the Seattle City Council passed two measures earlier this month that provide some measure of protection for trees. (Both the Seattle Times and seattlepi.com covered the issue).

One resolution asks the city’s planning department to come up with tree-cutting rules by May 2010. Currently, private property owners can cut down three trees without having to get a permit. The rules may consider fines for improper tree-cutting and incentives for keeping trees intact during development. The second ordinance establishes an Urban Forestry Commission that includes scientists, a developer and tree advocates.