“‘When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.” - Leviticus 19:9, 10
Those same people walk on sidewalks without going through the toll booths!
(for US people, sidewalks are designated areas on the side of the road especially for pedestrians, or as some people say, wasted space)
We call them pavements in the UK and I kinda think sidewalk is more descriptive. You walk on the side of the road.
I actually really appreciate the rational response to this that people have had about waste fruit, the rotting, and the food chain that follows the fallen fruit.
I had wanted to plant a few fruit trees in my front yard and allow neighbors to just take fruit off of it. Lots of people walk up my 0.5mi dead-end road.
But then I remembered what every PYO farm is like…tons of rotting fruits sitting at the bottom of all of them. And any apple someone picks that isn’t 100% perfect gets tossed in the pile.
That’s a lot of maintenance. Totally doable for an individual or small group to maintain a small patch. Gets really difficult to scale up.
I don’t believe this conversation actually occurred. Why would anyone care about a fruit tree being picked?
I believe it happened I’ve had many insane conversations with people like this.
Like food banks and people will say well what if people that don’t need it go there. I’m like so what, if 1 in a 1000 abuses a system it doesn’t mean we should make the 999 suffer by removing it.
In my city, olive trees thrive like mad. I could probably start a business selling a few tons of brined and jarred olives a year entirely on free produce.
Lemons, too. I could go for a 15 minute walk in any random neighbourhood and come back with 10 pounds of lemons.
Lemon stealing whore.
I live in Canberra, Australia and we also have an excellent climate for olives and lemons. Apples and practically all citrus also do well and plums and other stone fruit grow like topsi. Figs too.
Deep inland, 600m elevation
We need to protect many of our fruit trees from birds, but not olives, apples, or citrus
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Athens?
Shelbyville?
Gross, no. A different Mediterranean climate nowhere near the Mediterranean.
The town I grew up in had several public apple trees. I have fond memories of climbing the trees with my friends to get apples.
Maintenance is a thing, though. If not properly maintained, the apples will often grow too densely, yielding only small and sour apples. I would never consider the apples in my home town to be filling food - at best it would be a small snack. It would require a lot of labour to maintain a tree to the point where it would feed people in need.
Public trees already have a maintenance schedule and budget, public fruit trees don’t need to be about filling hungry people, they’re just as much about finding small moments of joy in your community.
Also trees that bear fruit usually don’t produce as much pollen in spring so it would cut down on hayfever, they do drop more seed which can be messier if planted along sidewalks. That’s the main reason decorative public trees are often male, 40 years ago civic planners decided pollen was easier to deal with than seed drop.
I think whoever put the trees in my yard felt the same way.
Never see any acorns or pinecones. Sometimes a maple seedpod floats it’s way into my yard.
But our (silver and white) cars turn fluorescent green with tree spooge if we don’t rinse them off daily in the spring.
I have an apple tree in my yard. It needs to be pruned and thinned at appropriate times. Sometimes pest control is required, but that’s pretty much it. If done properly, it is a couple of hours of work per year max
I can’t recall the source, but I remember hearing that the Amazon, generations ago, was farmed. The trees aren’t distributed naturally, or something like that, we see signs of intentional crop management. However, it was done in a symbiotic way with nature so that it almost looks natural, until you look closer. With lots of fruit trees and food sources so that food was an abundant free resource.
Wish I could remember the source for this, sounds like heaven on earth, working with nature is all we need to rediscover freedom.
1491 by Charles Mann. The book everyone should read instead of Guns, Germs and Steel which is a bunch of hooey.
You’re thinking about indigenous groups that farmed parts of the Amazon. You want a rabbit hole? Google Terra preta. See you in a few years ;)
You got me going down the rabbit hole at work now. Very fascinating stuff. It’s incredible the things that our ancestors knew about nature that have been lost to time.
Next stop !soilscience@slrpnk.net !
Urban planning is tricky, some times nice ideas have super tricky executions. Planting fruit/food trees in public spaces also accounts for rodents and pests, and managing disease vectors. Was just reading about fruit bats and Marburg virus spread in Central Africa…, regardless, just something that needs to be done with planning and consideration https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/04/23/178603623/want-to-forage-in-your-city-theres-a-map-for-that
And things that people are allergic to, like wasps and bees
We’re banned from planting fruit-bearing trees in our Florida neighborhood due to pest problems.
This sounds outrageous from outside the state… turns out, it’s not. Oh, it is not, you have no idea. Planting those on main street would be a catastrophe.
What I’m saying is this sounds nice in theory, but there are all sorts of knock-on effects that have nothing to do with humans, and you’d have to at the very least tailor it to the local environment and climate.
Maybe its better in like boulder or San Francisco?
I put on a vest and plant clones of apple trees in public parks
I put on my robe and wizard hat…
I flip my hair back and forth
Also. Hemp
These are the same people that run restaurants that will throw away perfectly good food instead of donating it and then keep their trash bins locked.
I used to live in a peaceful, quiet suburb. Eventually, a Panera appeared, as one does. At the end of each day, the Panera had a load of bread that was uneaten and un-purchased. The employees decided that the right thing to do was to give away the uneaten and un-purchased bread at the end of each day. I got some of it. Others did as well. It would be a waste otherwise! It would go into the dumpster, if nobody were to eat this delicious bread!
Those who were the most needy eventually got word of this free delicious bread. It began attracting ruffians. Travelers. Hobos, you know—homeless people. They traveled from the deeper parts of the city to seek this golden mana.
The locals didn’t approve of these dirty people migrating to our alcove and congregating about the back of the Panera every day. For some mere loaves of bread! It was depressing, and more importantly, it could affect our property values! What if they linger about and people think our city was one that not only catered to the lower people, but harbored them? And so, it was dealt with. The police helped to put a stop to it, bless their souls. We thank them for their service.
Now, the citizens of this peaceful city no longer have to view the sad visages of those who never learned how to play the game of our society. The excess bread may rot locked away in that dumpster, but it is the price we must pay for the cleanliness and uninterrupted peace we enjoy.
BIG /s. I typed this out so somebody may see how fucked-up this line of thinking is.
The park that I live next to has 3 apple trees (I’m in USA). These are not grocery store apples, they’re small and riddle with bugs, this isn’t an orchard.
When the apples are ripe, they’ll get picked by kids and familes for a couple weeks. Nobody hordes them, nobody sees it as stealing, they’re cool, and great for the community.
I’m just sad that they’re getting old and about to die. There used to be 5 just a couple years ago. I think they may have planted a couple new saplings, but I’m not an arborist.
Fruit trees typically don’t live as long as other trees, that’s probably why parks and rec usually don’t plant them. Having to replace an apple tree every 25 years as opposed to a Maple, Oak, Sycamore, Pine, Elm, Cedar every 100-200+ years, kinda an easy choice. With that said, I like it, and think it’s worth. More parks should have a handful of them.
Obligatory:
Face = palm
This sounded plausible until she said they poured bleach on the ground. Then it had the smell of bullshit.
People drink bleach to avoid a life saving vaccine.
In this parody of a world we live in I say it is not so far fetched someone would do this.
We should put public roads in our city.
Why, so people can just trespass everywhere?
You just know some asshole would pick all the trees clean and go sell the fruit
No offense to you personally, but I hate this kind of premature defeatism. Like… yeah, some people are jerks and try to take advantage of things. Put rules in place and enforce them as much as the people in charge care to.
I know it’s strawmanning to bring this up, but people use the same argument to say "We shouldn’t have food stamps for hungry kids or welfare for needy families or subsidized housing for people without homes because people will abuse it. Yeah. Some people will, and others will suffer because of their greed. But so many more people will continue to suffer if we don’t even try because we are too scared of The Undeserving boogeyman. Not every tree will be taken advantage of, and as the sense of outreach and community grows, abuse of it will fall and it will be worth it. I guarantee it…
I hate this kind of premature defeatism
This is what “the tragedy of the commons” was all about in pre-Victorian England. Rich people decried the existence of land held and used by all the people of a community, claiming that it couldn’t work in practice because eventually some asshole would always take it all for themselves. Turns out they were the some asshole, seizing all the commons for themselves as private property (a process known as “enclosure”), ending many centuries of actually successful common usage of land.
Honestly it’s really telling on them.
Like you can’t do nice things because X. So they don’t do it.
That too. “I’m a fiscally conservative Republican who doesn’t believe in handouts.” Oh? How convenient that you can selfishly hoard all your money for yourself by hiding behind principle…
Sometimes they are even taking advantage of welfare themselves, but don’t seem to make that connection.
Visit Portland. Lots of neighborhoods grow fruit trees.
And the fruit falls to the ground.
Nobody is going around selling them.
As someone who lives in Portland, yes.
People stealing fruit from trees is the least of my Portland worries.
Watching the tree to see when the fruit is ripe and then carting around a ladder to pick it? That sounds like a fucking job.
How acceptable is it, if you can reach a plant / tree from the sidewalk, to pick someone else’s fruit? Would that be considered weird, or totally acceptable behavior?
Only if you’re weird about it. If it’s a tree on the sidewalk, go for it.
In Hawaii it’s quite funny to see, because it if can be reached, it can be taken. So there are these hilarious fellas who have these baskets on long poles, and at the end of it there’s this little hand/grabber thing. They reach out as far as they can over the fence, press the button at the bottom, and fwoomp! There goes the fruit from the tree into the basket. I remember my cousin staking out avocados waiting for them to get ripe.
Hmm, weird but maybe good weird unless the person is weird about it.
And I mean just like 1 or 2 pieces. Not backing up a truck or anything. In case that changes your answer. Thanks
My dream is that people could live in supportive communes or whatever, so this seems fine to me.
If it’s overhanging public property it’s fair game. The owner has plenty of fruit on their side too I’ll bet. If they take issue with it they can guide their plant so it’s confined to their property. That being said I wouldn’t be reaching over the fence to yank a cucumber or apple.
Plant enough so they can’t make a profit.
In the US, probably.
Here in Sweden, there are public fruit trees and bushes, herbs etc. all over the place, and very very rarely does that happen. I live a 15-minute tram ride from the centre of the second-largest city and have within a 10-minute walking distance of my apartment several kinds of plums, cherries, currants, apples, pears, other berries and most common herbs, edible flowers and so on, all in random public places. We also have several “fruit groves” around the city, larger green areas specifically for publicly available fruits and more.
So what
And then cut down the tree.
