guest post by Burstein!
The fine folks at Neighborhood Fruit have made a map of San Francisco that shows fruit trees on public lands. This is great if you are a fan of cherry plums and loquats. Their database is (obviously) incomplete, so if you know of any apple, pear, lemon or anything growing on public lands, then you can register and share the wealth.
Neighborhood Fruit was created to make use of the abundant fruit growing in our urban neighborhoods. Currently, the bulk of fruit grown in back yards in our cities goes to waste, while the fruit we consume is grown in water-intensive orchards far from our homes. We envision a different future, where the bulk of backyard fruit is utilized and shared between neighbors. We envision a future where the food we eat is truly fresh, seasonal and local. Our diets replete with home-made goodies.
Here Are A Few Related Posts You Might Enjoy:
- “Land Walker” Japanese Robot Suit
- EveryBlock, Track News In Your City, Neighborhood & Block
- Fisherman’s Wharf, A Journey Through a Foreign Land
- Tic Tac Toast, Helping You Play With Your Food
- Lawyers For Burners, Helping To Flight Unwarranted BLM Citations
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
A great site that has sprung up (pun intended) recently around this sort of thinking is: http://hyperlocavore.ning.com/
Leslie
Hey Leslie! Thanks for mentioning my site – hyperlocavore is a yard sharing social network built to help people form and nurture yard sharing groups with their friends, family and neighbors to grow food much closer to home with less money, less work and more fun!
As for forage any one can add a local group and share information, with the level of detail you guys suggest. I would love to expand the site to have that sort of reviewable data.
Happy Digging!
liz mclellan
twitter me @hyperlocavore
Oooops I should add the permanent address is hyperlocavore.com I may eventually leave ning…
This has been done similarly in Los Angeles as well. http://fallenfruit.org/maps.html
Yea, this site doesn’t look like it’s got much longevity. I suppose they got data from the city to populate the list maybe? But a map full of “Cherry Plum” trees that rarely produce any fruit and are decorative trees isn’t of much use.
I want something like this to succeed, but bunk data will prevent any repeat visitors.
I love this idea, and also want it to succeed, so I will be asking my friends who try to force feed me the lemons they grew to register on this site!
I am curious to see if anyone adds things like “gigantic berry patch on Bernal Hill” to the database.
BUNK!! The trees within a few block of my home– indicated as Marina strawberry, olive, Nitida curtian fig, and others do NOT produce edible fruit. We need a system where people can rate the validity of information; this is just another “look what I did with some spurious information and Google” map. [sigh]
When I clicked on a tree, there was data saying “Does this tree bear fruit? Not sure.” I guess it’s up to us to provide feedback whether it’s an edible tree that bears fruit, or one that does not.
I’m very excited about this, I hope people in other cities start to add more data.