Mansion Mission Fruitful

Hungry families in Ventura County will have plenty of vitamin C, thanks in part to a juicy donation from the Piru Mansion.

And the manager of the private residence hopes her example will inspire others to help the hungry.

For the third consecutive week, volunteers on Wednesday combed the three acres of orange groves around the Victorian home in search of ripe oranges for Food Share, the county’s food bank.

Their efforts yielded about 1,000 pounds of Valencia oranges and brought the total gathered from the groves to about 5,000 pounds, said Roger Davis, Food Share’s farm and field coordinator.

Pat Morgen, the mansion’s property manager, was behind the offer to Food Share.

“We would have had to pay for them to get picked,” Morgen said.

The property spends about $1,100 a year to water and fertilize the orange trees.

Initially Davis had trouble getting the food bank’s corps of mostly retired volunteers to make the trek from its Oxnard headquarters to the mansion. “Piru’s quite a distance to drive,” he said.

So Morgen enlisted the help of San Salvador Mission in Piru to recruit local volunteers. About 10 people showed up to gather fruit Wednesday.

Volunteers received bread, produce and pastries from Food Share in exchange for their hour of labor amid the orange trees.

Morgen says she often sees private properties with fruit that goes unused and hopes her example will spur others to “make some good use out of it, instead of letting it rot on the trees.”

Food Share feeds 35,000 people a month, relying on a dwindling corps of volunteers to help gather excess food from fields. Because of declining prices, oranges are in ready supply, Davis said.

“A lot of it is because they couldn’t sell them,” he said. “I have eight acres in one place, five acres someplace else.” The volunteers gather everything from spinach and broccoli to peaches and Asian pears.

As an incentive, volunteers get to keep some of what they gather.

“We say they can take a bucketful of whatever we’re picking home with them,” he said. “It’s a lot of variety.”

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FYI

To donate produce to Food Share, contact Roger Davis at 983-7100, Ext. 41. To volunteer with the group, contact Dolores Wysocki at Ext. 13.