If you’re driving down Dover Street in north Oakland, you might be able to catch a glimpse of a 40-foot tree towering in a backyard that this time of year is teeming with thousands of small orange fruits called loquats. This sticky stone fruit, also called a Japanese plum, litters the ground beneath the tree as well, the delicate produce splattered from its fall. If you drove by the first weekend of June, you may have glimpsed an even stranger sight: a man standing 20 feet up an outside stairwell, leaning as far over the edge as he could with a 12-foot branch cutter, reaching into the depths of the branches. What you might not have been able to see behind the fence was the people below, one with a box and protective eyewear (someone else’s sunglasses), straining their neck, feet in a wide stance, ready to catch the branch that was soon to be snipped from the tree, and the other people scurrying about picking salvageable fruit from the ground and throwing it into the buckets and boxes for collection around.
The man precariously leaning over a railing with 12 foot clippers is Daniel Goldberg, the creator of Feral Ecology, a project that aims to use the “feral fruit” of the East Bay, or the fruit that grows on the plentiful fruit trees lining streets and shading backyards, but whose bounty is often overlooked. Bushels of fruit go to waste due to the sheer amount of it on a tree, or just the general lack of knowledge about foraging. He wants to collect this fruit, from plums to pears to oranges, and ferment away to create fruit wine.
Goldberg has been foraging on his own or with small groups of friends since he moved to the Bay for undergrad at UC Berkeley in 2013. He started a mushroom foraging guide service in 2023, and he’s been trying to find a way to involve the community through education around foraging.
“I just think that’s something that’s really badly wanted in the world, and oftentimes people are so disconnected from anything that would get them on the road to [foraging],” he said. “It’s just something I’ve been brewing on for a while now.”
The first weekend of June was his first time organizing a large-scale forager event. He gathered local foragers or forager-curious Bay Area people together to collect loquats. For four straight days, from Thursday, May 29 until Sunday, June 1, they collected, organized, hauled, and stomped on fruit for up to 12 hours each day. People climbed trees, used fruit pickers or branch cutters that extended multiple stories high, and ran back and forth beneath the trees with boxes or their sweatshirts pulled taut to catch the fragile fruit before it hit the ground. The ultimate goal was to collect loquats from around 50 trees strewn across the East Bay and then create foot-stomped wine from the bounty.
Foraging connections and community
When Goldberg first noticed the excess of forageable fruit around the Bay, he started collecting it himself or with friends and making jams. Then he ventured into making sodas, beers, and wines on his countertop at home. As he got more into fruit wines, eventually some of these wines were tasted at wine fairs such as Cider Circus and By the Way Wine Fair, where people showed enough interest that he began to consider scaling up the operation.
“I didn’t really want to just make wine,” he said. “I also wanted to teach people that they could make wine in their backyard and kind of open up the door to interacting with the nature that’s around us.”
Last year, he organized a group of his friends for this wine making, but it only included a couple of cherry plum and loquat trees with a few 100 pounds of fruit that they then mashed in a friend’s backyard. This year, he decided it was time to host a larger group with an open invitation to the public.
For this larger event, he chose around 50 loquat trees across Berkeley and Oakland to collect from. He went door to door to the property owners to ask permission to show up with a band of eclectic foragers to gather the fruit. Being connected with Richmond Wine Collective also helped spur this larger event, having a place he could host the mashing and make the wine.
The Richmond Wine Collective is a shared facility in Richmond where 21 winemakers operate. It houses a range of winemakers from novices to seasoned small producers, and the space is designed to provide a community of like-minded people who can learn from each other.
More than 40 people joined Goldberg’s multi-day foraging and winemaking event this year. It was a mix of his friends and random people who heard about the event through other means — roughly 20% of the group were strangers to him.
One forager who joined, Sasha Waniewska, was a friend of Goldberg’s through another of his interests, the Bay’s Balkan music community. She said that growing up in the South Bay, she’d casually picked loquats as a child. She would sometimes play a game of spitting the small pits as far as she could.
She described loquats as “the juiciest, with delicate skin and the seeds are so fun.”
On the first day of the gathering — a Thursday evening — eight to 10 people were in attendance. Some brought their own equipment to gather fruit, while others used equipment provided by Goldberg. Some foragers also opted to climb trees.
While going from tree to tree, Goldberg said that one of his favorite things was the random interactions they had with people. Several passersby stopped to ask what they were doing, or what loquats were. Some people stopped to share their own experiences gathering fruit.
One interaction came on the first day the Feral Ecology founder was out while he was gathering fruit alone. A man working across the street approached him, explaining he was from India and consumes 10-15 loquats daily from the tree Goldberg was gathering from. He shared how he grew up eating the fruit in India, all while eating loquats out of the bin that Goldberg had filled (which Goldberg highly encouraged everyone to do).
Some of the interactions weren’t as positive, as some people thought the group was taking the fruit without permission or just messing with the trees. Goldberg welcomed these interactions as much as the positive ones.
“I really value those more challenging interactions as well. We’re living in a city where there’s a lot of isolation and baseline mistrust of strangers,” he said, using these interactions as an opportunity to hear where these people are coming from and explain to others what the idea is behind the project and maybe give them some loquats.
“When that person is triggered into coming out and interacting, it’s an opportunity to maybe heal something with why they might be so distrustful or triggered by people they don’t know coming and foraging fruit,” he said.
The tree on Dover Street was one of the tallest the group encountered. At least 300 pounds hung from its branches and were scattered on the ground. Rivkah Beth Medow is the owner of the house, and after Goldberg spotted the enormous tree from the street and knocked on the door to inquire about harvesting the fruit, she welcomed the group into her yard.
She asked them only to pick the fruit higher in the tree since she eats the reachable ones. Conveniently, she had a tall staircase next to her tree, as well as a shed that she allowed Goldberg to climb onto the roof of. With both of these methods and the 12-foot trimmer, the group was able to get to the heights of the tree. As a bunch of fruit was cut, it was someone’s job to stand below with a box or their shirt held at the ready to try and collect as many loquats as they could before they smashed to the ground and splattered.
Loquats are extremely fragile and have a short shelf life, which is the main reason you don’t find them in many stores.
Medow said the secret to this large, bountiful tree was that when she moved into the house 15 years ago, the sewer line had clay pipes so that tree might’ve been getting some extra nutrients before she replaced the pipes. The tree is still extremely healthy, but Medow said she noticed a difference once the pipes were fixed. The tree is striking, but no one has come to harvest the fruit before. Someone had come to photograph the tree for a book on natural dye, though.
“You can really feel the abundance of nature in a tree like this,” Goldberg said as he reached to cut some more fruit into boxes being held below. “You could spend three hours and barely make a dent in the tree.”
Once the fruit was collected, the crew met at the Richmond Wine Collective, also called the Study Wine Bar/Purity Bar to create the wine. Goldberg said that a moment that stood out to him was unloading all of the loquats and seeing how much the group had collected, which ended up being almost a ton of loquats.
The group then partook in the smashing of the loquats with their feet. Socks were stripped off, feet were washed with soap and then sprayed down, and then into the bin with hundreds of loquats people went. Music was turned on, and people danced in the bins or put their arms around each other as they stomped. Some in the group spent almost two hours with their feet amongst the loquats as the mash became softer and softer (although there were many complaints of the pits causing some pain). Eventually, honey, fig leaves, and more water were added to the mixture, creating a new texture that some described as akin to oatmeal.
The next steps of the wine process are to press the fruit in a cider press to get the pits and skins out, leaving only the juice. The juice is then poured into drums to ferment for a couple of months. After that, the wine can be bottled. Some of the wine will be sold in stores, under the label “Feral Ecology”, but Goldberg also wants to find a way to make some of the wine part of the gift economy, part of a community that is shaped around reciprocity and abundance.
“I want to continue exploring how to create a little bit more of a demonetized spirit of interacting and generosity,” he said. “I think we all wish to live in a world that has more of that, but unfortunately, it’s really hard to come by for various reasons.”
The weekend of foraging was really about bringing people together, he said, and finding the poetry in these community actions that draw people closer to the environment. Goldberg said there’s so much damage humans have brought to the environment, that there appears to be a fear of having an intimate relationship with nature and he wants to create a space to find this relationship.
“How is interacting with the fruit trees going to rewild our psyche a little bit and bring out that play and curiosity to be like, I can interact and create beauty out of this,” he said.
Continuing family traditions in new places
Goldberg didn’t start foraging until he moved to the Bay, but foraging has brought him closer to his family and roots. His parents both immigrated from Belarus, then part of the Soviet Union, where they grew up foraging. When they moved to New York City, where he was raised, they stopped this practice but would speak of it. When he moved to the Bay, he wanted to rekindle this part of his past.
“Not having experienced that place, I just get morsels and bits from them that just come out randomly about what life might have been like for them,” he said. “I felt like there were a lot of negative things about their time there that were at the forefront, but I always sensed a little bit of a sparkle in their eye when they talked about when they would go mushroom foraging in the summers and berry picking.”
He always had it in the back of his head from these stories that this was a special, unique activity, even though he and his parents never did it in New York growing up.
“Growing up in an urban environment, I had a kind of yearning to know something about how it feels to be enmeshed in one’s environment, in that way that leaves an imprint in one’s heart,” he said.
This was his motivation to start gardening when he moved to Berkeley, and his motivation to audit a class during undergrad on California mushrooms. Those both kickstarted his passion for foraging all that he could out here from mushrooms to fruit to mussels. Now, when his parents visit him, they all go foraging together.
“I feel like my interest in it sort of brought us together over it again, and reconnected them a little bit to something that they’d kind of forgotten,” he said.
Keep an eye on Feral Ecology’s website, Instagram, and WhatsApp group to learn about future events, including another harvest, this time for plums, July 17-19 and a winemaking course cohosted with Learning By Hand.
