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
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 Cupertino houses have boxes of fruit of different kinds in front of their house. It is all free. Very kind of them.
“‘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.
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.
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 vulnerable 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.
That’s disgusting
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.
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
You just know some asshole would pick all the trees clean and go sell the fruit
Plant enough so they can’t make a profit.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
So what
okay, and? plant more trees then, or how superhuman is this dude that they can personally harvest every single tree?
And then cut down the tree.
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.
We’re gonna need the detail. The county jail is public property, but you can’t waltz in and say hi to the inmates.
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.
So you were there when it wasn’t public property, legally speaking.
In this case, they mean “public property” as in it’s the property of the public. It’s owned by the government, by the tax payers.
You’re thinking public or state ownership. Public property is property generally meant to be used by the public. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t conditions to that use though, like hours of operation.
Most of this is in that article you linked…
You’re buzzing around the point like a fly on shit
That would imply the point is shit, which I don’t think it really is. It’s more like they’re buzzing around the point like how a fly will buzz around a chili dog at a baseball game. Likewise, they are being annoying and making it harder to digest.
Property generally meant to be used by the public is “open to the public,” not public property. The grocery store is open to the public, but it is not public property, it’s private property.
But why should a public park have hours of operation? Benches and open space don’t stop working after certain hours, don’t take resources or workers to operate, they’re just there. Why should we punish people for enjoying the outdoors?
Swing through Washington square park at 2 in the morning, better still if you can do it 20 years ago
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.
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
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
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’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 !soilscience@slrpnk.net !
1491 by Charles Mann. The book everyone should read instead of Guns, Germs and Steel which is a bunch of hooey.
“God created everything for billionaires to profit from!” Duh!
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 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
Athens?
Shelbyville?
Gross, no. A different Mediterranean climate nowhere near the Mediterranean.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah the answer is almost never that there is no solution, and most simple problems have easy solutions.
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.
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.
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.
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 🤬🤬🤬🤬
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.
Sounds like job creation to me
Agreed.
You mean like shoveling sidewalks in the winter?
Oh no.
The horror.
Does the snow smell like shit and attract wasps and animals that shit all over.
As opposed to the neighborhood dogs shitting all over?
And yeah having pollinators back would be helpful.
Bringing nature back is a good thing.
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 think people are thinking more that if you want to feed people just give them food you buy is more cost effective.
Because fruit on a grass field isn’t a hazard? Also who said anything about cars? Cyclists use the road too and it’s a much larger hazard for them than for cars. You’re the one thinking about cars here, not me.
You’re coming on pretty strong and I haven’t even had my coffee.
There are other comments about the topics I am getting at. I’m not attacking you but agreeing with you.
Chill bruh.
How fucked is it that our first thoughts are about cars and sidewalks?
And this isn’t coming on strong? I’ll chill when you chill
abusing your mod powers is a great way to settle this
I’d say that’s a question for city planners.
Fallen bananas are slippery.
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
I thought they were banned to prevent free food and thus discouraged homeless people.
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
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.
40 years ago civic planners decided pollen was easier to deal with than seed drop.
Well, screw those people! In both nostrils!
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.
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.
