Easy Homemade Fruit Picker

Don't worry about bruising or dropping your fruits ever again!

Reader Contribution by Allan Douglas
Updated on August 8, 2022
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YouTube/Fun-Easy Crafts

Made a homemade fruit picker out of a plastic bottle and a broom handle as inexpensive fruit harvesting tools.

When fall comes and my arms are not long enough to reach all the peaches, apples and pears on our trees, I turn to some homemade gadget or other to harvest that fruit.

A ladder? No! Ladders are great on flat, level surfaces, but nowhere on our mountain-side property is there a flat surface: Everything is a slope of some kind, and most of our fruit trees are on a steep slope.

In the past I’ve used a mini-rake with a couple of pegs in a cross-bar on the end of a stick to pull fruit down. Unless someone else was there with a catcher’s mitt, the fruit hit the ground, which bruises it. Often it rolled down the hill necessitating pursuit. I’ve fashioned a “claw” by mutilating a wire coat hanger into two fingers above and a “thumb” below. If the thumb is more of a ring, the piece of fruit could sometimes be lowered down from the tree for retrieval. Sometimes. Other times it would fall off, hit the ground and skitter away.

This year I saw an idea on the Internet – the photograph I saw was a Facebook repost from Pinterest. It’s hard saying where it originated. It uses a plastic beverage bottle on a stick as a picker-catcher. I decided to try that this year.

The Bottle

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