City Fruit: Guerrilla Grafting

[marmar]

from Civil Eats:



City Fruit: Guerrilla Grafting

March 23rd, 2012
By Patricia Larenas


San Francisco will experience an unexpected windfall of free fruit thanks to a group of graft-happy gardeners. They call themselves the Guerrilla Grafters, and their vision is to see the trees lining the city streets begin to produce perfectly edible food. When I interviewed one of the Guerrilla Grafters recently, I learned that it’s not all about the grafting.

I discovered that Tara (last name withheld to protect her privacy), an early member of the Guerrilla Grafters, cares deeply about the society in which we live and our relationship with public spaces. We had interesting and engaging chat via Skype, and she explained what’s behind their efforts to crowd-source caring for fruiting trees in public spaces.

Let Them Eat Fruit

The Guerrilla Grafters are splicing productive branches onto the city’s non-fruiting ornamental trees and transforming them into fruit bearing trees. They’re methodically repurposing the city’s once strictly ornamental apple, cherry, and pear trees as food producers.

Why didn’t the city plant fruit producing trees in the first place? It seems that fruit trees in urban centers are undesirable since they attract rodents and because of the potential for rotting fruit littering the sidewalks. The Guerrilla Grafters have a solution to those concerns: they only graft trees that have caretakers who commit to their proper upkeep. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://civileats.com/2012/03/23/interview-with-a-guerrilla-grafter/

[NYC_SKP]

1. It occured to me last week that every school should have orange and apple trees...

Yet I've never ever seen either at any of the hundreds of schools I've visited.

Free public healthy food.

What a concept.

[SoCalDem]

2. non fruiting also means less mess as the fruit goes unpicked

and messes up sidewalks & roadways when it falls to the ground & rots

No fruit also means less birds who will poop all over the place.

Developers look for ornamental vs productive

[Igel]

3. True.

The UCLA campus has Russian olives (I think they're Russian) scattered about.

The sidewalks are stained dark part of the year with crushed olives. And much of the rest of the year they're stained with olive oil.

Our neighbors when I was a kid had a huge apple tree in the front yard. They picked the bottom branches. The rest of the fruit fell on their yard, the sidewalk, and the street and rotted. We'd take boat oars and use them to smack the apples. There'd be days where the dominant activity was a rotting apple battle.

But I still really like the idea of bearing fruit trees in (quasi)public places. It's just that in a lot of places nobody would want to be seen picking the fruit. When my brother lived in an apartment there were orange trees scattered about the complex, but when I asked him if he or anybody else picked them the answer was a shocked "no." When I lived in Los Angeles we could see a hand of bananas in the complex next door ripen every year through our bedroom window, but the manager of that complex always let them rot.

Easier to pick those than to pick cherries.

(Me? My front yard is landscaped with jujubes and serviceberries, edible cannas and, in early spring, purslane. There's a satsuma on the side, and blueberries and silverberries to provide summer shade for the southern exposure.)

[kestrel91316]

6. Those aren't Russian olives (which aren't edible). They are actual

OLIVE TREES. This is Los Angeles, they grow here anywhere you stick them in the ground. Our Mediterranean climate is perfect for them.

Yep, in the fall/winter you do get those messy black olives all over the ground, but the birds will eat them. I had a huge unkempt olive tree in the side yard when I rented the house - unfortunately there is some sort of insect pest that ruins the fruit, that you have to spray for in order to really use them. I gathered a bunch and tried to cure them one year but it was a failure, lol. Great idea in theory, but not as easy as I had hoped.

[noamnety]

4. Growing food is messy

we prefer to let people starve. An added benefit - when homeless people have no food, just like the birds, they will poop less.

It's a fucked up world we live in when we value clean sidewalks over feeding people.

[SoCalDem]

5. I'm not saying it's bad..just added my thoughts in WHY developers chose the way they did

We had mulberry trees all over when I was a kid, and every "fruit season" we had a slurry of bird poop & purple goo running off the roofs every time it rained..

TENDED fruit trees are another thing entirely

[GoCubsGo]

9. You just brought up the real reason the city opposes them.

They don't want the homeless eat that fruit, or anything else. They just want them to go away. Food-bearing trees will just attract more of them, something the city leaders likely don't want.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

7. Thank you! I have a Golden Delicious that I want to graft..

the tree was planted 4 years ago, but it was a lousy choice. I want to graft it with more flavorful and storable varieties.
now I just have to learn how, or call the Gorilla grafters up to Oregon!

[SoCalDem]

8. If there is a college near you, call & ask if someone from the botany department

could help you.

goldens are too mushy