We need to re-think our relationship with property.
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 🤬🤬🤬🤬
“‘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.
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.
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.
I don’t believe this conversation actually occurred. Why would anyone care about a fruit tree being picked?
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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
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 grow like topsi
Deep inland, 600m elevation
Athens?
Gross, no. A different Mediterranean climate nowhere near the Mediterranean.
Shelbyville?
it costs money to take care of trees like that. There’s a lot of work you need to do to make sure the fruit comes out the correct way.
That’s the neat part: community tree is taken care by the community.
95% of the cost is just time, which I am willing to donate for a better society.
How about we just tax every billionaire by 2% of each of their total income, capital gains included and use that money on food banks and to give every law abiding homeless person a home?
Instead of weak half-measures like throwing free food out into the streets
The trees aren’t meant to solve homelessness or poverty. They also do more than just feed people. As a whole I think its worth it, and we can also tax the rich to pay for social welfare at the same time.
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.
if that really is such a massive problem (i have never heard of that being a problem ever before, so what if they’re sour? just make cider then) just plant something else then, wild plums still taste great.
also like… you can just plant more trees, you don’t need one single tree to feed 500 people, there is a depressing amount of completely unused space in most urban areas which you can just fill with fruit-bearing plants.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, fruiting trees take a lot more maintenance just to keep alive, even moreso if you want them to produce anything worth eating.
I have two plum trees in my front yard that I planted about 5 years ago and they take about as much work to maintain as a small garden patch. Modern fruit trees aren’t really natural, they’ve been bred over time to produce more and more fruit. With so much of its energy going to produce fruit, it leaves them more susceptible to disease and especially pests.
If you like gardening it’s a great little hobby, but I couldn’t imagine the amount of work it would take to maintain hundreds or even dozens of public trees. Plus, I’m not so sure how comfortable I would be eating the fruits of trees absorbing all the petrochemicals from road wash.
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
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?
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 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 [email protected] !
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
Usufruct
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
