“‘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
Leviticus Its in the pick and choose portion of the king james opinion of the bible.
I think something like this would be carried over into the new covenant as the spirit of the law remained
Except they don’t do that. What they do is pick and choose from the old testament and ignore any part of the new testament that is inconvenient. Not all of them. Just the majority of them. What they do instead is take away the benches least someone in need to sleep there. They punish those that feed the needy in many places. They pass laws to make the most venerable of us criminals for daring to exist in their presence.
I don’t listen to what people say. I watch what they do. What the majority of christians in my area do is hateful and very non christian. All of them are convinced though that god always wants exactly what they want.
Well it is “the Rules of the Tribe of Levi” canonically speaking they are laws made not by God but by a bunch of priests. It is important for biblical historical context reasons but technically speaking these are ancient society laws. It’s why instructional portions detailing animal sacrifice are included in that section when modern Christians tend to look at animal sacrifice as a satanic cult kind of thing.
Provided you are Christian ( before the atheists start in, I’m not - I just study the religion as a part of gaining historical background info) Using Leviticus to justify one’s opinions on anything strikes me as showing that one read the text absent the scholarly context. A lot of Christians do this because book annotations wouldn’t be a thing before 1000 AD and it really benefited a lot of powerful people to never mention context of the compiling process of the book because once the supposed less than divine fingerprints on the processed material are brought to light it weakens it’s power as a tool of authority.
canonically speaking they are laws made not by God
but the passage ends with God signing off on the law
So next time you’re at the tabernacle or trying to be being a priest you’ll know how to behave, sure.
God signs of on mortal codes of governance multiple times in the text. Obedience to “Laws of the land” are a thing in other texts. The order seems to be “be orderly and in accordance to whatever the power structure where you are agrees is fair” it is pretty all over the place, Romans, Deuteronomy, Paul, Hebrews Numbers… God wields a pretty big ole rubber stamp.
Yeah, you don’t use the 5e handbook as your character sheet, just like you don’t use the Bible as your moral code.
You get to not play as a charitable and kind Christian if you don’t want to, you can just as well play a greedy and mean subclass.
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.
Same comments I got when I said I was planting apple trees in my front yard. Those are for the public, the ones in my back yard are for me.
Everyone in my street is selling their apples on the street. Every house has a little basket and a sign “1 kilo 1 euro” or something like that. Some are even giving them away for free. I gave mine away in bulk, so I haven’t got anything to pu in the street.
The annoying thing about fruit trees is that the fruits are only good for picking for like 1-2 weeks of the whole year. If you don’t pick them during those 2 weeks, they rot and spoil. That’s why the whole street tries to sell them pretty much at the same time, because you can’t pick fruit like a basket at the time. You have to pick the whole tree during those 2 weeks.
It depends on the tree, I think, doesn’t it? I have a fig tree and the figs are great for about 45 seconds in July. Essentially unfit for human consumption any other time!
Mine is in August. Figs supposedly have two harvests a year, but I must have blinked during the other one.
it’s pretty standard here to have a basket outside your fence where you dump the fallen fruit that looks nice, most people don’t even want the fruit from their trees in the first place so they’re just glad to have some of it magically disappear.
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?
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
Lemon stealing whore.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”
Somehow that simply doesn’t happen in any place with public fruit trees
Then I say we enforce the social contract of “don’t be a fucking asshole”, with force if needed.
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.
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 🤬🤬🤬🤬
From a city planner view point this would never fly because it was attract insects to public spaces.
How disgusting! Nature? In my neighborhood? Ugh.
In my city, city planners decided to bring trees that aren’t native to our country (sycamore trees), and now we have an invasion of these bugs that bite and stink bugs.
But at least we don’t have, god forbid, bees.
It’s bog standard to have fruit trees and berry bushes in urban areas here in sweden, rowan trees and serviceberry bushes are literally everywhere, and it simply is not a problem. Birds will eat most of it before you even have time to notice the fruit going bad.
How dare we have pollinators.
Same for any flowers
it is indeed s problem if that response came from your neighbor or some other johnq on the street. 100% expected from a politician though
You just know some asshole would pick all the trees clean and go sell the fruit
And then cut down the tree.
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.
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.
Visit Portland. Lots of neighborhoods grow fruit trees.
And the fruit falls to the ground.
Nobody is going around selling them.
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?
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.
it also depends on how much fruit there is, if they have literally 500 apples in the tree then there is no way they’re actually going to make use of all that, if they have 4 sad fruits left hanging then you leave it alone.
If they’ve got 4 fruits left and they’re all hanging over the fence then they just harvested their tree. Let’s not look for hyperspecific edge cases here we’re discussing a rule of thumb.
i’d consider anyone who gives a shit about that to be weird and unpleasant, if you don’t want people to eat your fruit maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaybe don’t have half the tree hanging outside your property.
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.
Only if you’re weird about it. If it’s a tree on the sidewalk, go for it.
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.
As someone who lives in Portland, yes.
People stealing fruit from trees is the least of my Portland worries.
So what
okay, and? plant more trees then, or how superhuman is this dude that they can personally harvest every single tree?
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.
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.
Down under, it’s usually footpath which I think is even more descriptive
Footpath makes it sound like it goes through the woods or a field or something.
It can do. But your feet do work outside of woods and fields too.
Footpath is also the more popular term in the UK IMO
In the US basically anything paved is pavement.
Asphalt road: Pavement
Concrete sidewalk: Pavement
Giant parking lot: Pavement
Gravel road: Believe it or not - paveme… well that one’s debatable.
I’d say gravel roads can be argued to be “paved” if it’s really fine gravel that has been properly packed down by repeated driving on it, to the point where it starts looking shiny and sort of like glazed clay
Gravelment
Obligatory:
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.
Face = palm
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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.
