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
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.
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.
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?
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
Fallen bananas are slippery.
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
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
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?
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.
Obligatory:
From a city planner view point this would never fly because it was attract insects to public spaces.
How dare we have pollinators.
Same for any flowers
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.
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.
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.
We used to have loquat trees in the city, it was fine, people could take them to eat but they are small and, while delicious, not a commercial fruit here, mostly seeds. The trees aren’t there anymore, there was a redesign of that plaza, but not because there was a rush on the loquats.
Someone was, however, stealing the ducks of the city to sell. Nobody planted them.
Aren’t there cherry trees in DC? Or are cherry blossom trees not cherry trees?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
