'The Johnny Appleseed of Sandpoint'

SANDPOINT — One friend calls him the Johnny Appleseed of Sandpoint.

Some know him as "The Plum Man."

More folks call him Sprouts than his actual name — Jeff Rich.

Rich spends these golden autumnal days gleaning fruit from the trees where landowners have encouraged him to take the fruit to share because they aren’t going to eat it all. He takes boxes and bags of fruit to the food bank and to people he knows will make good use of it.

For Rich, it’s about not wasting and using his energy to give to others.

“Just this week I came home to a bag of Italian plums on my porch with no note. I know they were from him, however. Because that’s Jeff, always serving others. And he’s always looking out for the Earth, and sustaining the Earth,” said Jane Fritz, who describes Rich as her oldest friend of 41 years in Sandpoint.

Gleaning is a part of looking out for the Earth, Fritz said, “and he works so hard.”

At 77, Rich still weighs what he did in college and due to his gleaning efforts and manual labor odd jobs, he is still physically strong and “and in good health, gratefully,” he said. One might see Rich in his red truck parked at Winter Ridge where he asks people if they’d like some fruit. Sometimes people give him a little gas money in exchange.

He started gleaning many years ago when he noticed a plum tree behind the former pool and pizza hall on Cedar Street called Riccardo’s. The tree was loaded with ripe and delicious plums that were going to waste. He broadened the scope of his gleaning and went on fruit hunts. He goes back to the same trees each year and adds new ones to his mental list because some pear and apple trees don’t produce fruit every year. “They take a year off now and again,” he said.

People in the community, often elderly, invite him to pick their fruit because they don’t have the wherewithal to preserve it. Others pay him to do some pruning of trees and invite him to take fruit.

With a Master’s degree in early childhood education, Rich taught for many years in state schools and he worked at hospitals helping kids with rare diseases.

“He loves little children and they love him,” Fritz said. He occasionally leaves a bucket of plums in the Waldorf School playground for the children.

“It’s amazing how many kids come up to me and ask me if I have plums. It’s like candy to them,” he said.

For many years, Rich worked at the Eureka Institute, an experiential educational site for youth in Sagle. There he showed kids how to make wheatgrass juice, a nutritional drink, among other lessons on healthful foods. If Rich had his way, the supermarkets would offer packages of dried local cherries, plums, and apples at the check-out rather than candies filled with mostly sugar and chemicals.

Besides plums, Rich gleans pears, cherries, and apples. His generosity extends to the community in other ways; he cuts firewood for “starving artists” and “single young and middle-aged moms whose old man has disappeared,” he said. He’s been known to glean potatoes at a potato farm up north and then give them to the food bank.

His 9-tray dehydrator is always going this time of the year. He sells some of the dried fruit, sends dried plums to friends in Paris every year, and to his sister for Christmas. “They count on it,” he said.

He would like to organize a crew in neighborhoods to harvest the fruit right where people live.

“As a Vietnam veteran, he has dedicated the rest of his life to bringing love and peace into the world instead of war,” Fritz said, and love and peace may come in the form of plums.

Rich says the gleaning and giving “brings a smile to a face,” he said, adding, “But people exaggerate my goodness. I’m just a nobody, plum crazy,” he said.