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.
It’s not terrible, but it’s also not great. Fruit trees by their nature produce just mountains of fruit for a single tree. I came from a large farming family and we had a few fruit trees. So much of it ends up on the ground and rotting (which, not so bad since it was in a field, a nightmare if it were in the suburbs).
If you really want one, you NEED to maintain the tree. That means cutting branches to make sure the tree doesn’t grow up and instead grows out. It also means constant maintenance to make sure branches aren’t overloaded (growing out means they have a higher risk of breaking).
Regular trees are already a PITA to take properly maintain, fruit trees are another level.
And even with all that, you’ll still end up with a bunch of rotting fruit on the ground. Birds, insects, etc will nibble at your fruits. You’ll simply miss the 50 fruit the ripened early or late. It’s just going to be a headache no matter what you do.
And it’s a lot of fruit. 1 tree can easily make enough fruit for 20 people. That comes in all at once.
It’s worth keeping in mind though, if you want to feed people: we can just do that, we have the food and we have the infrastructure. Every person going hungry in a city with edible food in bins, produce discarded for not looking right and so on is going hungry because of policy decisions.
It is cheaper, healthier, and more successful to just distribute the food we already grow, make and transport than trying to turn everything into an orchid.
We should put public roads in our city.
Why, so people can just trespass everywhere?
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
My parents are happy when people pick fruits from the trees at the street. When they fall they rot no one except the wasps and insects have something from it.
No-good lazy workshy people stealing food from hardworking wasps 🤬🤬🤬🤬
Don’t fruit trees need extra care and pruning, and the fruit that falls to the ground is also kind of a mess to clean up. Sturdy trees are good in the city, since they are low upkeep and very good for air quality and shade. I am however a huge fan of vertical gardens with edible plants. Imagine a whole wall with mint growing on it, that would be wicked!
Public works departments already deal with a lot of bullshit from the builder’s special trees that are already installed, managing permaculture forests would actually be easier in many ways. Portland Oregon handles this by making homeowners responsible for the sidewalk easement so they are encouraged to plant trees that don’t get too tall and don’t get too wide with their roots so the sidewalk doesn’t buckle. So you get people planting a lot of fruit trees. There is a Gleaning group there that goes and gathers ripe fruit and does stuff with it like applesauce, or there is also a cider made by Portland Cider Company with juices from gleaned fruit they get off people’s trees around town. It’s pretty good cider.
trees don’t need much of anything, they’re perfectly capable of growing on their own. I can’t imagine they prune any of the fruit trees in my city (beyond like, removing big damaged branches and stuff that just applies to literally any tree in an urban area) and they produce fruit just fine.
Fruit falling to the ground isn’t particularly problematic either, like yeah it rots and stuff but… okay? who cares? it’s gone within like a week and if people are really so unable to handle the reality of food then they can toss it in the compost.
We had a lot of berry bushes at the side of the road in my hometown. Trees were often apple or Japanese cherry blossom trees. And of course the local chestnut tree made up a lot of them. Wich are also delicious. All of them bore fruit and nuts and we loved picking the stuf.
Sturdy trees are good in the city, since they are low upkeep and very good for air quality and shade.
Sturdy trees WOULD be good for the city, yeah. Unfortunately we’ve decided to, in basically every major city (at least here in NA and I suspect other places), plant non-native trees that have low survival rates and are basically all male. Being male, they tend to also shit pollen basically everywhere. I’d imagine you could deal with the fruit falling to the ground in a number of ways, as well. Could put some canopy underneath the fruiting trees, as to collect the fruit more easily, you could just pay people to come and collect enough of the fruit for use in things like applesauce that the rest of the fruit really presents no issue as far as just sort of rotting and draining into the ground. You could set up a bunch of easy disposal compost boxes every couple feet, so you can just sweep all the fruit up and throw it into that.
I suspect a larger problem would probably be that inside of the city the fruit would be exposed to more than an acceptable amount of brake dust, including that which drains into the planter box, and would maybe not get enough light, but I think those are generally problems we should be solving anyways since they don’t disappear just because we decide not to plant fruit trees. Brake dust on the fruit or carcinogens inside the fruit means that those things are also going to be going into your lungs.
Date trees line the boulevards of many Mediterranean countries, and there is no issue with cleanup or rot.
How do they handle that?
…they shovel or wash the walkways if they get dirty.
Simple solution. Jobs creating. Thank you.
If you want to maximize production, yeah, you cut at certain times of the year to force the trees to put as much energy into the fruit as possible. But if you just leave them outside they will fruit as long as they are sufficiently watered and have enough room to grow (and it’s not insanely stressed from a drought or heat wave, etc). There might not be as many fruits, and they might be smaller, but it will produce. But ideally you always want to choose fruit or nut trees that are native to your region (or at least your agricultural zone) so that they require less upkeep in general.
I think it’s a combination of the effort required and sadly the liability too. I would imagine anyone who is saying “feel free to come eat this food” is exposing themselves to lawsuits, to some degree. The kinds of organizations who are large enough to make a big impact by deciding to grow some food on their properties are the same ones who’d be targeted by frivolous lawsuits, costing money just to defend against, and offering the orgs no tangible benefit in return.
To be clear, I don’t agree with structuring things this way and I think it’s a trash way for our society to work, but growing food in “public” places seems non-viable without addressing that big vulnerability somehow.
If the suits who run society find out that people would get this fruit for free, they’d probably make it so that taking this fruit is considered stealing. You’d get a fine, charged with thievery because it’s property of the city.
Hear me out; hire a few more municipal employees, care for the trees/pick the fruit, place in “blessing boxes” in public spaces, post office, library, DMV, tax office, town/city hall, worship venues etc? Employees can take what they need too?
Lmao. A box. Someone has no idea the productivity of fruit trees or how long picked fruit will last outside of refrigeration.
I guess not, having grown up with them.
I mean cmon though - in a capitalist country someone would take ALL the fruit and then sell it to people. “It was public but then it became MINE and if you want it you need to enrich MY wealth with a piece of YOUR value”
that sounds like they’re doing work then, what’s the problem?
Hoarding and repackaging a free public good in order to sell it back to the people it was originally free for?
Do you work for Nestle?
you’d prefer not having fruits in the first place, just to prevent someone from harvesting and selling them?
Don’t sealion me, you know that’s not the argument I was making
Reminds me of a video I saw of a lady taking all the books from a “little library” someone has in front of their house. The lady thought free books to sell, but didn’t care it’s a “library” means check out books or trade books.
Then I say we enforce the social contract of “don’t be a fucking asshole”, with force if needed.
Somehow that simply doesn’t happen in any place with public fruit trees
deleted by creator
I only care when a single individual or group picks all of the fruit from the public trees just so that they can sell it down the road and profit from it.
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.
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
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.
Wait, why? Bleach is a common way to kill plants in the short term without any long term lingering effects in the soil since it decomposes into salt and water. With enough drainage, the salt seeps out and plants can grow again. I’d say it’s a pretty pragmatic solution to ensuring that someone doesn’t grow anything again in the short term.
Johnny Appleseed would have a word
Lol lmao. The right to the fruit of something is literally one of the kinds of Roman property law that informs European ideas of property rights.
Fruit trees are mostly just expensive to grow vs other kinds and can be unappealing if fruit spoils or attracts other animals. E.g. you probably wouldn’t want to play on the grass underneath an orange tree on all the little bits of orange after possums have at it.
Ginko Biloba would like to know your location
I don’t understand sorry
Because it’s a tree that smells awful if you don’t clean up all the dropped fruits.
It’s a dietary supplement that helps memory. I think they are implying that Europe needs help remembering.
Lmaoo no. It’s also a tree and it’s fruit smells like rotting shit. They only permit male trees in cities for this reason
No you weren’t.
Unfortunately, we have bears around my parts. And bears like the fruit too, driving human bear conflict. Which means the bears are killed. 🐻 :(
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.
Athens?
Gross, no. A different Mediterranean climate nowhere near the Mediterranean.
Shelbyville?
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 grow like topsi
Deep inland, 600m elevation
