You don't should construct a time machine to return to the time before Silicon Valley was Silicon Valley. Nestled between a library, an elementary school and a town hall, Saratoga is a rarity within the Bay Area: 14 hectares of undeveloped land that the town desires to preserve.
Called the Saratoga Heritage Orchard, the world is home to hawks, ground squirrels, gophers and over 1,000 fruit trees. The orchard was originally intended as a tribute to the South Bay's agricultural origins – what John Muir once called “the valley of the heart's delight” – and is a reminder of what the South Bay looked like before it became a technology hub.
The orchard is technically a park, which the town declared a cultural monument in 1988. Saratoga is certainly one of the few Bay Area cities, together with Sunnyvale and Los Altos, to have a historic orchard.
“I think it's outstanding and it's one of those unique things that Saratoga has to offer that other communities have long given up on,” said Saratoga Vice Mayor Chuck Page.
The orchard was managed for a long time by Novakovich Orchards, but in 2020 home orchard and landscaping company Orchard Keepers took over the duty. With an emphasis on regenerative agriculture and community engagement, Orchard Keepers have worked to plant recent trees to exchange those who died from a root fungus and have found ways to bring the fruit to the community and the community to the fruit.
Matthew Sutton, founder and president of Orchard Keepers, said visitors to the historic Saratoga Orchard can witness firsthand how fruit was once grown within the South Bay: trees leisurely planted as much as 20 feet apart, and fruit that grows with devotion.
“That’s the historic land use of this entire area,” he said.
In 2021, the Orchard Keepers launched an annual harvest that allowed Saratoga residents to return to the orchard and pick the apricots, plums and cherries that grow only a stone's throw from their backyards. Residents pick the low-hanging fruit, then the San Jose-based volunteer group Village Harvest brings industrial-sized ladders to achieve the fruit on higher branches.
“There's this huge hidden resource that's everywhere here in Silicon Valley,” said Craig Diserens, executive director of Village Harvest, which recruits volunteers to select fruit to donate to food banks. “We are fortunate in the Bay Area to have fruit year-round. This is actually very unusual.”
In Village Harvest's first 12 months in 2001, the group picked and donated 1,200 kilos of fruit. In 2024, that number rose to 165,000 kilos.
In addition to picking private and community orchards like in Saratoga, Village Harvest also picks fruit from backyard trees and travels backwards and forwards between backyards in sunshine and even light rain to place excess fruit to good use.
On the grey, foggy morning of Dec. 17, a handful of volunteers gathered under two 10-foot-tall citrus trees in San Jose's Willow Glen neighborhood. They stood on ladders and used extendable pickers before throwing oranges and lemons into large buckets. These two trees alone could produce as much as 500 kilos of fruit, and the volunteers still had several residential trees to reap.
“Probably every one of these homes has hidden fruit trees, so the feeling is that the neighborhoods have one fruit tree per home or every other home — just this amazing hidden resource,” Diserens said. “But once you realize it’s there, you start to wonder how you could put it to good use.”
Diserens calculates that between 10 and 40 million kilos of fruit grow naturally within the backyards of Silicon Valley residents. He said if everyone helped pick the remaining fruit, we could eliminate hunger within the Bay Area.
“We have this food factory here that doesn’t help anyone but the rats,” said Marc Rogers, the Willow Glen resident who allowed Village Harvest volunteers to select the fruit from his trees. “There is just such a need that remains unmet. … This stuff stays shelf-stable and you can freeze the juice.”
The program not only helps make the most of the abundance of fruit, but additionally brings Silicon Valley residents closer to their environment.
“We pick year-round,” said John Turner, a Saratoga resident who has volunteered at Village Harvest for nearly 19 years. “It's great; There is always something to discover in this area.”
Despite community support, the long run of Saratoga Heritage Orchard will not be guaranteed. Although the Orchard Keepers' $135,200 annual contract with the town is only a drop within the bucket that represents the town's $30.6 million budget for 2024-25, city staff are facing a budget deficit Warned over the following few years, programs just like the heritage orchard could find yourself on the chopping block.
And Saratoga, like other cities and towns across the state, has been tasked by the state with finding space to construct tons of of latest housing units by 2031. Page, who has been involved in the town council's efforts to preserve the orchard, said there may be at all times a probability a future council could vote to overturn that call, paving the best way for a housing development to develop on the property .
“There are a million options, but I don't think any of them will be addressed until we actually look at what next year's budget will look like,” Page said.
The Saratoga Orchard also has to take care of climate change. Sutton said as winters have turn into warmer within the Bay Area, the cherry trees within the orchard have been unable to achieve cold temperatures they need for fruit production for several hundred hours in a row. The few remaining cherry trees within the orchard began showing signs of blooming as early as January, although longtime Bay Area residents know that peak cherry picking season falls around Memorial Day.
Sutton said he’s confident the community's overwhelming support for the historic orchard will probably be enough to maintain it going.
“If we allowed them all to be undermined and developed, then there would only be stories about them,” he said. “There would be no living representation of this story.”
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