November 19, 2009 - 1:00am

Do you mind if we pick your pears?

Dianne MacLean remembers the first time she pulled her car into a stranger’s driveway on Vancouver Island, went and knocked on the person’s door and said, “If you’re not going to eat those ripe cherries on that tree, may I pick them?” MacLean used to be a nurse but, back then, she was a single mom on welfare disability, and she knew other struggling moms, and here they all were, as she saw it, living in the fertile Comox Valley where pear and apple and cherry trees grow on every street, and all this fruit was rotting on the ground.

The stranger with the cherries invited her in enthusiastically, says MacLean. “We’ve got tons of stuff here,” the woman said. “It was like the Garden of Eden,” MacLean recalled on the phone last week from her home in Courtenay, B.C. “She had kiwis, walnuts, apples and pears. She was totally overwhelmed. She couldn’t deal with it all. A friend of mine and I borrowed a ladder and we picked the cherries first.”

It’s been 10 years since MacLean climbed that first cherry tree and with local resident Jean duGal started what’s become known as the Fruit Tree Project. The program enlists a network of volunteers who pick fruit off the property of willing homeowners. The volunteers keep a third of the fruit for themselves, give a third to the homeowner and a third to the needy.