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.
We should put public roads in our city.
Why, so people can just trespass everywhere?
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
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 thought they were banned to prevent free food and thus discouraged homeless people.
You mean like shoveling sidewalks in the winter?
Oh no.
The horror.
Sounds like job creation to me
Agreed.
Fallen bananas are slippery.
what if the trees are planted in a park, far from the road?
How fucked is it that our first thoughts are about cars and sidewalks?
Cars, yeah it’s fucked. But I think keeping things walkable is good.
No doubt, but look at the black and white thinking in this thread. We can’t have fruit trees at all because they might interfere with sidewalks, or because city planners might get in a huff.
I’m not discounting the legitimate concerns of trafficability or zoning, but to write it off completely for these concerns is trash. If we can engineer a tailings dam and plan for 100 year floods that might ruin it, then we can figure out a way to permit fruit bearing trees in cities.
I’d say that’s a question for city planners.
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.
You would if you were hungry and didn’t have money
You just know some asshole would pick all the trees clean and go sell the fruit
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.
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?
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.
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.
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…
Honestly it’s really telling on them.
Like you can’t do nice things because X. So they don’t do it.
And then cut down the tree.
So what
Plant enough so they can’t make a profit.
Obligatory:
This sounded plausible until she said they poured bleach on the ground. Then it had the smell of bullshit.
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.
Laws regarding public access to nature are much better in Europe & the UK than in the US.
If I remember correctly, Trespassing isn’t a viable law in Finland.
You want to walk across the land? Go ahead.
In the US: CRIME
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.
But what if you want to make moonshine or cook meth? How are you supposed to get some privacy with people traipsing all over the place?
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.
it is indeed a problem if that response came from your neighbor or some other johnq on the street. 100% expected from a politician though
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?
Just a bafflingly dumb response to such an obviously great thing to do.
This is the result of a century of propaganda and destruction of public spaces
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!
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?
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.
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. 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.
“God created everything for billionaires to profit from!” Duh!
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.
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”
Then I say we enforce the social contract of “don’t be a fucking asshole”, with force if needed.
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.
