You don’t need to build a time machine to go back to the days before Silicon Valley was Silicon Valley. Sandwiched between a library, an elementary school and city hall in Saratoga lies a Bay Area rarity: 14 acres of undeveloped land that the city wants to keep that way.
Called the Saratoga Heritage Orchard, the space is home to hawks, ground squirrels, gophers and over 1,000 fruit trees. Originally designated to recognize the South Bay’s distinctly agricultural origins – what John Muir once termed “the Valley of Heart’s Delight” – the orchard serves as a reminder of what the South Bay looked like before it became a tech hub.
The orchard is technically a park that the city designated a heritage landmark in 1988. Saratoga is one of few Bay Area cities to have a heritage orchard, along with Sunnyvale and Los Altos.
“I think it’s outstanding, and it is one of those unique things that Saratoga has that other communities have long since given up on,” said Saratoga Vice Mayor Chuck Page.
For decades, the orchard was managed by Novakovich Orchards, but the home orchard and landscaping company Orchard Keepers took over the job in 2020. With a focus on regenerative agriculture and community involvement, Orchard Keepers have worked to plant new trees to replace the ones that died from a root fungus and has found ways to bring the fruit to the community and the community to the fruit.
Matthew Sutton, Orchard Keepers’ founder and president, said visitors to the Saratoga’s heritage orchard can witness firsthand how fruit used to grow in the South Bay: trees leisurely planted up to 20 feet apart, fruit growing with abandon.
“This is the historical land use of this whole area,” he said.
Orchard Keepers in 2021 started an annual harvest, allowing Saratoga residents to come to the orchard and pick the apricots, plums and cherries that grow just a stone’s throw from their backyards. Residents pick the low-hanging fruit, then the San Jose-based volunteer group Village Harvest brings in industrial-size ladders to reach the fruit on higher branches.
“There’s this huge hidden resource that’s just everywhere here in Silicon Valley,” said Craig Diserens, executive director of Village Harvest, which recruits volunteers to pick fruit to donate to food banks. “We’re fortunate in the Bay Area to have year-round fruit. That’s actually a very unusual.”
In Village Harvest’s first year in 2001, the group picked and donated 1,200 pounds of fruit. In 2024, that number grew to 165,000 pounds.
In addition to picking private and community orchards like in Saratoga, Village Harvest picks the fruit off backyard trees, caravanning between backyards in sun or even light rain to put excess fruit to good use.
On the gray, misty morning of Dec. 17, a handful of volunteers gathered beneath two 10-foot-tall citrus trees in San Jose’s Willow Glen neighborhood, standing on ladders and using extendable pickers before dropping oranges and lemons into large buckets. Those two trees alone could produce up to 500 pounds of fruit, and the volunteers still had several residential trees to harvest.
“Probably each of these homes has got fruit trees tucked behind them, so the sense of neighborhoods having a fruit tree per house or every other house – it’s just this amazing hidden resource,” Diserens said. “But once you realize it’s there, you start wondering how you could put this to good use.”
By Diserens’ calculation, there are between 10 million and 40 million pounds of fruit naturally growing in Silicon Valley’s residents’ backyards. He said if everyone pitched in to pick that leftover fruit, we could eradicate hunger in the Bay Area.
“We have this food factory here that’s not helping anybody except the rats,” said Marc Rogers, the Willow Glen resident who allowed Village Harvest volunteers to pick his trees’ fruit. “There’s just such a need that goes unfilled. … This stuff will keep, and you can freeze the juice.”
The program not only helps find a use for the abundance of fruit but also brings Silicon Valley residents closer to their environment.
“We pick all year round,” said John Turner, a Saratoga resident who has been volunteering with Village Harvest for almost 19 years. “It’s great; there’s always something to pick in this area.”
Despite community support, the future of the Saratoga Heritage Orchard is not guaranteed. Though Orchard Keepers’ $135,200 annual contract with the city is only a drop in the bucket that is the city’s $30.6 million budget for 2024-25, city staff have warned of a budget deficit to come in the next few years, meaning programs like the heritage orchard could end up on the chopping block.
And Saratoga, like other cities and municipalities statewide, has been tasked by the state with finding space to build hundreds of new housing units by 2031. Page, who was part of a city council effort to preserve the orchard, said there’s always a chance that a future council could vote to overturn that decision, paving the way for the land to become a site of a housing development.
“There’s a million options, but I don’t think any of them will be addressed until we actually look at what the budget’s going to look like for the next year,” Page said.
The Saratoga orchard is also having to deal with climate change. Sutton said as the Bay Area’s winters have gotten warmer, the orchard’s cherry trees haven’t been able to get the several hundred consecutive hours of cold temperatures they need for fruit production. The few remaining cherry trees in the orchard were already showing signs of blooming in January, though longtime Bay Area residents know that peak cherry picking season is around Memorial Day.
Sutton said he’s hopeful that the overwhelming community support for the heritage orchard will be enough to keep it going.
“If we let them all get plowed under and developed, then there would just be stories about it,” he said. “There wouldn’t be any kind of living representation of that history.”
