First-year students in horticulture completed a service-learning project this week, delivering more than a half-ton of apples they gathered to central Iowa shelters and missions.

Members of the horticulture learning community at Iowa State participated in the project as a portion of their orientation course, Horticulture 110. The service aspect of the course was implemented for the first time this semester, said Gail Nonnecke, professor of horticulture.

Through the project, students learned about the apple harvesting process and provided service to the community at large, Nonnecke said. Youth and Shelter Services of Ames and the Bethel and Door of Faith missions in Des Moines are the recipients of the produce.

Students played a big role in who received the extra fruit, said Barb Osborn, program coordinator in horticulture and the instructor of the orientation course. “Small groups research where they should go,” she said.

“We met and decided where the apples were going,” said Callista Cheers, freshman in horticulture. She and Anna Vold, also a freshman in horticulture, were the primary players in that process.

Both agree that their involvement with the service project and with the horticulture learning community as a whole has been beneficial.

“It’s been a good experience,” Vold said. “Field trips have been a lot of fun.”

The class visited various areas of interest around campus along with several visits to the Horticultural Research Station east of Gilbert, where the apple harvesting and grading took place.

The students gathered inside one of the buildings at the research station last Thursday and used its grading facilities to clean and sort three varieties of apples for quality, type and size. They were joined by several volunteers from Youth and Shelter Services of Ames, who assisted the ISU students with their work and joined them in a pizza party before taking freshly graded bags of apples home with them.

Phyllis Craig, volunteer coordinator for Youth and Shelter Services, said her group is always looking for ways to be involved in the community.

“Kids go to different events to help out if they can,” she said. Youth and Shelter Services has a wide variety of services for children and families to assist with various problems faced by young people, Craig said.

Nonnecke said that food pantries at the missions are thrilled to receive the produce donations.

“It’s food they don’t have to prepare,” she said.

The class spent several afternoons in September picking apples from trees not being used by researchers, Nonnecke said. The harvesting process is more complicated than might be imagined, Nonnecke said, because students must be gentle and “harvest [apples] without putting fingerprints on them.”

Osborn pointed out that the project had great benefits for the research facility as well as for the charities.

“The neat thing, I think, is that the produce was going to waste,” Osborn said.

Produce from “guard” trees marking sections of the orchards and from various experiments is either sold wholesale to commercial distributors or is left alone, said Will Emley, superintendent of the Horticulture Research Station.