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About a year ago I mentioned here about the small but significant gesture that is Feral Fruit Mapping... and now it's that time of year again (southside of this planet, anyways)... things are blossoming left, right and centre, and it is therfore a most excellent time to get your Feral Fruit Map going and map out where fruit is overhanging fences and growing roadside in your area, in preperation for the potential harvest to come... Since I posted about this subject last year, I've discovered a bunch of folks both in Oz and abroad who are collating and sharing knowledge on this sorta subject in a variety of formats, which is great! However, I cannot help but be a little amazed that it isn't happening more visibly, more often... ah well - perhaps one of the potential upsides to the recent economic downturn is that more people look to their back lanes and roadsides for some old-fashioned sustenance, rather than doing their hunting and gathering gathering only from their supermarket shelves... At anyrate, here's what I've stumbled across so far in the last year - please let me know if you know of other examples... FallenFruit.org - LA based fruit mappers/artists: "Using fruit as our lens, Fallen Fruit investigates urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community. From protests to proposals for new urban green spaces, we aim to reconfigure the relation between those who have resources and those who do not, to examine the nature of & in the city, and to investigate new, shared forms of land use and property." Go Kids. The site includes simple 'how tos' on mapping etc. Here they are on Facebook and even at Ars Electronica. Urban Orchard projects - Loose but wonderful affiliations of residents who share and swap surplus fruit and produce once a month... sorta Feral-Fruit-Comes-to-U... You show up with lotsa lemons and you swap for apricots and some beans. Obviously the majority of the participants have their own tree of some type in their yard, but who's to complain if you show up with a load of fejoas that you gathered from that abandonded house next to the railway line? There seems to be a Melbourne contingent hosted by Ceres, and the Sydney one is starting up via Alfalfa House. Also, a How-to guide for setting an Urban Orchard up in your community... Weedy Connection - Diego is a Sydney based artist who had created a damn fine 'useful + edible weed' database and regularly holds weed workshops around Sydney and beyond... he's apparently keen to start on a Sydney Feral Food map so I'm hopeful that mentioning it here will give him a proverbial poke. Remembering that a weed is, by definition, only a plant out of place, there's alot more to be gleaned in your local park than you might think... And then there's folks like Leda who commented on the last Feral Fruit post with; I've been using the Google maps function on my iPhone to map the fruit trees here in Brooklyn, NY. I just bookmark each tree with a description and a pin on the map. Works beautifully! I also include a note about the date that particular fruit was ripe. I've also hear rumours on various Permaculture lists of State-based initiatives to map the feral food of a community for that communities use... especially in Melbourne - but as yet I have no proof that I can pass on.
Oh and lastly there's the National Post of Canada, who decided to do an article on this subject and quoted us... But surely that's not it? Anyone got any other leads? Or maps? Or community initiatives? Perhaps, as my own mother pointed out (who is a feral fruitier from way back) some folks keep the location of their secret peach trees to themselves... but I say that resource shared is a resource expanded so... any other leads on like-minded projects?
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