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.
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'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.
"‘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
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.
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...
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.
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.
I remember when I was young I got ticketed for trespassing on public property. I was so offended. Yet that’s the society we live in. Public resources aren’t for use by the public, they are for use by the small fraction of the public who control them.
It was for staying too late in a public park. It was meant to be closed after dark. I overstayed by like an hour.
I think there’s a big difference between breaking and entering and trespassing. Going into a restricted area is more like the latter. Although there’s the whole ethics of a prison to consider as well but I don’t want to get into that.
But yes there may be a small number of situations where public access should be forbidden but right now that’s a minority of all of the completely unnecessary restrictions that exist.
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.
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.
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.
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
Careful. I wouldn't be surprised if people get weird about the origin of said fruit. We both know that those olives in the grocery store come from trees like the one you're talking about. But "I plucked these from wild trees in the park" might not go over all that well.
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.
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 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'm guessing it's an older apple tree? Because my two establishing plumb trees take a lot more work than a couple hours a year.
Most of the effort for fruit trees is spent getting them established and shaped the way you want. After 10-15 years of growth they mostly take care of themselves, but depending on your environment the first 5-10 can take a lot of time and effort just to keep them alive.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've been told that this is a no-go for city planners because the sheer quantity of fallen fruit can be a walking hazard, and no one wants the legal liability. What it comes down to is that "free" fruit trees would require additional ongoing maintenance costs. Nothing nefarious, just logistical issues.
I imagine if there were trees all over every street in town there would be a lot of mushy ass fruit swarming with flies on the ground.
It's not a stable enough logistics chain to be viable, like, If I think "I'd like to possess a bowl of apples" I'm not going to like, patrol the streets and pick apples to that end.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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
No legal advice, but I am pretty sure picking an apple from a tree in a public space (but can be privately owned) for direct consumption is legal in Germany. Weird but understandable that you need a law for that.
Not just crime but in large parts of the country it's a popular myth that they can shoot you for being on their property. They can't, that's ridiculous, but Hollywood and popular myth won't let it die.
ironically i think this is technically not covered by nordic "right to roam" as that says you should avoid areas near housing, however if anyone tries to raise a stink about people picking fruits from public trees then everyone is going to tell them to shut up and stop being a miserable idiot.
Presumably because everyone assumes the tragedy of the commons will happen as it always does. And, little red hen, there's a sense that if one person does the work, they are owed the fruits of their labor
But a fruit tree in a public space is like an open field or playground equipment in a public space. They are there for everyone, and people who complain that the 'wrong people' are using those public rrsources for personal use are selfish idiots.
Like if a company came in and took all the fruit, sure, that would be wrong. But someone taking apples to make a pie? That's what it is there for.
What if I hire a dozen people to randomly, individually go and pick all the fruit and bring it to me, and then I make a profit reselling what they collect?
It's only a tragedy if allowing "first come, first served" until the resource is completely exhausted is actually a problematic outcome. For urban fruit trees intentionally planted for the public, I'd argue that that isn't the case.
how do you explain this just.. not being a problem that anyone talks about in areas where fruit trees are already plentiful in cities? I feel like people use the word "pests" the same way conservatives use the word "immigrants", it's just an abstract scapegoat to throw out whenever you want to argue against something..
I grew up in a town with plenty of fruit naturally growing (blackberries especially, which grow like weeds) and having an abundance absolutely meant that no one tried to horde it all. You could pick 10 pounds of blackberries and barely make a dent in the amount in any given neighborhood.
That's a good solution I didn't really consider. Sad that my brain considers 1 apple tree already way more than any government might be willing to plant
And if you actually read the Wikipedia article you linked:
The work of Elinor Ostrom, who received the Nobel Prize in Economics is seen by some economists as having refuted Hardin's claims.[1] Hardin's views on over-population have been criticised as simplistic[2] and racist. [3]
...
Hardin's work is criticised as historically inaccurate in failing to account for the demographic transition,[191] and for failing to distinguish between common property and open access resources.[192][193] Environmentalist Derrick Jensen claims the tragedy of the commons is used as propaganda for private ownership.[194][195] He says it has been used by the political right wing to hasten the final enclosure of the "common resources" of third world and indigenous people worldwide, as a part of the Washington Consensus.[196]
...
Other criticisms have focused on Hardin's racist and eugenicist views, claiming that his arguments are directed towards forcible population control, particularly for people of color.[210][211]
The "tragedy of the commons" is one of those things that's very Intuitive, but doesn't actually hold up to much scrutiny.
that just obviously doesn't happen though, my city's full of fruit trees all over and the absolute worst thing that happens is that dumb kids shake down some of the fruit because they're dumb, and you can just.. pick that up..
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?
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.
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?
Because we live in a world where everything is owned by someone and one must profit off of anything they possess or it's considered a wasteful liability.
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.
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.
Oh I'm sure some European countries have a more ecologically friendly setup than us. I'm speaking from the perspective of US city planners, and I assure you, this is a major consideration for them.
I hope they plan on coming back through and cleaning up all the not used drops. Especially before they all start rotting or animals get drunk on them and run into traffic.
Here is someone trying it but notice they have an entire crew devoted to managing them and their hundreds of lbs of produce weekly. None of this even talks about the logistics of distributing it either.