Obligatory:
This sounded plausible until she said they poured bleach on the ground. Then it had the smell of bullshit.
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.
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.
“‘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.
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.
Just a bafflingly dumb response to such an obviously great thing to do.
You just know some asshole would pick all the trees clean and go sell the fruit
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.
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…
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.
Visit Portland. Lots of neighborhoods grow fruit trees.
And the fruit falls to the ground.
Nobody is going around selling them.
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?
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.
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.
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.
