Actually I looked up the real story of Johnny Appleseed and he was more about making hard cider and selling land. 🙃
My US city has a few parks with apple trees, herb gardens, and other edibles. I don’t think there’s any law or rule against people going out and harvesting small individual use amounts as long as you don’t damage the plant. They do send out volunteer crews at harvest time (for the apples at least) and donate the harvest to food banks.
I don’t buy rosemary because there’s a bunch of parks around with rosemary bushes.
This is actually a great representation of the difference in culture I’ve seen between the US and visiting a couple places in Europe and particularly Sweden.
I don’t know if actual public fruit tree orchards are a thing anywhere, but the general feel of “holy crap they can have nice things in shared spaces here” was everywhere.
There’s sort of one in the US city I live in. The city manages it and as far as I know they don’t care if you go pick a few apples. It is part of a public park that used to be a farm/orchard, then turned into a small golf course, then was partially sold off for housing development and the core farm/orchard area was either given to or bought by the city. It also has a community garden which always has a waitlist for new plots.
That’s the weird thing about the US: we do actually have nice things, and communities that want to improve things. We also have suburbia hellscape.
There’s a park in Miami that is populated by fruit trees that people enjoy…and there’s an unspoken rule/law that any fruits that grow over a fence are fair game , just don’t climb my fence to steal my fucking mangos again Lisandra
Upvoting and replying in solidarity against fuuuckin’ Lisandra! ✊
I know of a golf course which has orchard trees on it and golfers are allowed to eat as much as they want.
So rich people get free food but not poor people 😂
Boots theory strikes again
Get the falling fruit app and you’ll be able to find fruit trees in your area that are available for picking.
In my city, olives are PROLIFIC and I’m still eating last year’s loved that I picked and brined
Hahahaha I had a look and it lists the dumpster out back of Aldi near me.
" Dumpster (edible) Season January - December"
It does also list dumpsters that are viable for diving for food yes… But you can filter those out, if you want, I guess.
We do have fruit trees in my country and it’s even normal for people that live around parks to plant them. Funny enough I’ve never seen a homeless person taking a fruit, always families.
162 comments and not one about lemon stealing whores.
Not sure if I’m disappointed or just old.
Yes, porn released in 2006 on DVD and uploaded to the internet in 2007 … You are surely very old …
I mean, it probably makes them at least 30. Im almost 30 and it feels quite old.
I was working as a private investigator in Hawaii between 1980 and 1988.
Tv show as well I suppose
No I have never been into TV too much. I am more of an active guy you could say. I love to watch baseball though, when Detroit is on, then I’m watching TV!
If you made public fruit trees, someone would try to pick them clean and sell it at a fruit stand 20 miles away.
This happens in low trust societies with scarce resources and even scarcer empathy as the result. Also known as “that’s why we cant’ have nice things”. However, not only it’s absolutely not universal, I don’t believe it’s even the majority
This is true and has led to my new system for evaluating economic systems, what does it do with antisocial people.
Capitalism is interesting in that it actually has a plan for them. Let them be greedy little fucks and the system works for a while. Then they fuck everything up and the system collapses, either in a minor correction every couple of years or into fascism.
I would love for something like socialism or communism to work, but there’s this 1% that would pick the trees clean to better their own lot.
I don’t have any answer, but I have come to the conclusion that every economic and social system should only be considered viable if there’s a reasonable and compelling solution for what to do with the guy that wants to pick the fruit tree clean.
the anarchist solution is to abolish property, meaning picking the fruit tree clean wouldn’t actually give you anything besides a bunch of rotting fruit and others will probably get angry and stop giving you the stuff they make
Then no one has fruit. There is a non-zero percent of the population who would pick the trees clean for that reason alone.
Anarchy, like capitalism, works best when all the actors are rational. People are not rational.
By having a society with a culture that encourages empathy
Yeah I think the only way around that would be to plant so many trees that the fruit is basically worthless. Probably wouldn’t work in places with high population density
Rotting fruit is also a massive problem :) One of my relative had this HUGE fucking pear tree. When it hit pear season, they were begging people to come and take all they could. They would beg food pantries to organize, come and pick.
Have pear tree, can confirm. I used to fill my dumpster twice with rotten fallen pears. I figured out a new tactic though: let them fall, then leave the back gate open so the urban deer can come eat them.
Then let’s get rid of money.
Well, how do you like them apples?
I like them free
I wonder if that person would consider foraging for mushrooms and berries in the forest to be stealing as well.
It can be.
Yup, this whole ownership thing is totally fubar!
(and yes, I do prefer to own things too, but there could be a healthy middle ground)
A long time ago I visited Athens in January, it was relatively warm, but those oranges weren’t sour as they suppose to be, they were bitter, which I actually love. They are amazing at giving you this jolt of energy when you walk the mountains.
In my mom’s hometown there are fruit trees literally everywhere. Everyone and their dog has them. The public areas have them. The forests have them. There are fruit all over the ground. Nobody ‘steals’ or gathers to sell. They make alcohol and share it with anyone that comes within line of sight like pokemon trainers forcing you to battle. Also all of the kids are sick of eating the fruit but if they feel like eating any they don’t even have to pick it themselves because all the parents and grandparents will pick wash and even cut up the fruit and serve it on a platter with even the slightest hint of interest. I ate a lot of plums and pears and drank a fuckload of brandy.
What’s the town? You can’t just promise a bounty of food and not name-drop it.
Sounds like somewhere in the Balkans.
100% agree with this. Plums, pears, and brandy - I’d bet Serbia or Bulgaria, maaaaybe Bosnia.
I’m more interested in the moonshine battles. I don’t think I can outdrink small town shiners but by jove I’ll give it a shot.
For legal reasons I would rather not give the location of the blackberry moonshine still that doesn’t exist in my shed and can’t be bought or made for under £50.
When I lived in the city, we caught people trespassing all the time stealing our fruit off our trees.
They would walk up our private driveway, and walk on our path near our front door, then load BAGS full and leave. I called them out as thief a few times, but those Mother F@$@ people just give a smug look back. These people were Pure evil. So happy to move to the country.
Before getting off notoriously racist Nextdoor, I did see a few folks complaining about this, they couldn’t harvest their own fruit crops because homeless folks would just come grab it all, usually before it was ripe enough to eat. This kicked off a big battle over who deserved the fruit more. Arguments that would have been better directed at the political leaders here who refuse to provide enough resources for the homeless. When we have to debate whether people can keep the fruit of their own trees, but we aren’t building shelters or allocating food at the macro level, then we have fallen deep in to the libertarian trap.
It’s people with Mercedes and BMW that steal from our trees, not homeless.
It’s pretty incredible, at least in the areas in the US where i have lived, to see who feels entitled to things and who does not.
They didn’t get rich by paying their fair shair…
Did you ever try peeing on them?
I imagine they walk too fast.
Well, yeah; trees planted from random apple seeds are most likely to bear crabapples. Nobody was going to be eating them.
johnny appleseed would also show up right after native americans were run off from their native orchards and declare those sapling riparian orchards his.
not a coincidence as his business was selling sour apple saplings to new immigrants.
johnny appleseed was a typical christian businessman using the chaos of genocide as a place to put his wallet and the marketing of a pot on his head to get notice.
and the US destroyed the last of the orchards that he claimed as his creation during Prohibition.
because usa.
Apparently apples were primarily used for making booze right from the start of the country, which does indeed make Johnny Appleseed’s story feel rather different.
Washington was a big fan of apple jack, which is what you get when apple cider is freeze distilled.
Much of the US is experiencing prime weather for apple jack actually, though it’s a little late to get a mash started in time for this weekend’s weather.
Probably not primarily booze, but vinegar. Prior to refrigeration and canning, food preservation was massively important. This meant salting, smoking or pickling. Apples that weren’t good for eating were important as a source for producing vinegar.
Primarily for cider. Of which you can make vinegar, but that was not the primary reason. It was cider, which was the most popular drink in colonial/early US.
It was for cider. They drank a staggering amount of beer, cider and rum on a daily basis in the early 1800’s. Cider consumption per capita in the was around 15 gallons/year. They drank even more beer and rum. They were also drinking around 5 gallons/year of distilled spirits.
Most people were what we would classify as functional alcoholics today.
15 gallons per year comes out to about 6 pints per week. Not exactly staggering amounts, but combined with the spirits (and I’m sure they were drinking other stuff as well), it would definitely qualify for alcoholism today.
If you know what brewing with apples and not having access to modern equipment, sanitation and yeast is like then I highly doubt they were in short supply of vinegar.
You can’t take the seed of a tasty apple, plant it and expect the tree to have similarly tasting apples. If you want to duplicate a tree, you need to take a twig and graft it on top of an existing tree.
Source: MinuteEarth on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIajCqcvTg8)
[Edit: Previously, before I remembered that this video exists, I couldn’t remember the correct word for “grafting”. Hence Sidyctism II.’s response.
Grafting?
Take a small branch of a tree you like, splice it using a technique, take a small young tree of same type but different variety, splice it, attach branch of variety you like, seal. Nurture it, and the branch uses the donor tree to pull up nutrients and water, and the branch then grows into a whole new tree. It’s cloning, but grafting helps it move faster and without as much risk.
They were responding to the original version of my comment where I asked what the technique was called.
Grafting?
Well, you can just buy apple trees from a nursery, it’s what farmers do.
Yes but that’s because the nursery has already grafted the branches of a known-to-be-tasty cultivar onto that tree before putting it up for sale.
Yeah, I’d just rather pay someone who knows what they’re doing for it rather than fuck it up over and over again on my own
When grafting, do you need to remove any of the original branches? Or will the tree grow two different types of apples? Or some kind of hybrid?
Any branches you don’t remove will still be the original tree. You can have a single tree that yields multiple varieties of apples.
Costco was selling fruit trees with multiple different fruits in it a few years ago. One cherry tree has 4 different cherries in it.
If I had a hard i would have bought one and put it in my yard
