Bugs, pests, and animals, at least where I live. Unless you build a green house, clear the yard of all other foliage, or somehow fortify your garden, only produce with natural defenses like peppers will make it to harvest. However, I am jealous of my friends on the west coast, who don’t really have to worry about bugs or other critters eating from their fruit trees just passively growing in their yard.
If you’re East Coast, I think you’ve just given up too early. Plenty of pests on the West Coast, too. There are also plenty of organic ways to keep them in check. Will you have perfect harvest? Never, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have anything at all.
There is a pretty great website called Falling fruit to map trees and other plants that you can pick from freely.
Hey. Thank you for sharing this.
Websites like this are the good part of the internet.
too busy eating avocado toast
Canadian here, that’s getting more and more common over here. There’s a ton of HOA bullshit here too but I’ve been seeing more and more food gardening in Vancouver, but that might also be because food is expensive as fuuuck here.
They’re all golf players wannabe.
And it’s always greener than your neibours one
Because this is illegal in most of America. You would be fined and the city would probably send a crew out to rip it all up and give you the invoice if you defied it and left it that way.
That’s a bit extreme? I think that you are correct that this may be the case in front yards depending on location, but backyards are usually fine for whatever barring some HOA BS or unusual local rules.
I’ve seen this happen before in real life so extreme or not, it’s definitely the norm in upstate New York at the very least. Had the city called on us while we were out of the country and we came back to all 6 of our small fruit trees dug up and tracks all over the front lawn from an excavator and a $2500 bill from the city.
So front yard? Yeah, not super surprised at that. I’ve heard plenty of stories about front yard cultivators running into problems with the city. I live in a more rural/urban mixed area so it’s a lot more forgiving. Plenty of people here have apples or other fruit trees in the front yard - not aggressively farming the yard, just as part of the plantings.
Ya front yard. We didn’t aggressively plant either. We had 4 or 5 fruit trees planted with beds around them
Shoulda gotten a tree lawyer. Tree law is not to be fucked with.
That really sucks.
It’s a matter of keeping the plants contained. I have witnessed cut down bushes and trees multiply than how they originally were before they were cut down. Try managing that in a home or somewhere smaller.
Probably need a permit and license
Wait…
Plenty of people have these things called “gardens”. You can grow food right in the ground with them. Fruit baring trees are also a thing people enjoy in thier yard.
Is your entire property filled with bushes or something?
We do tomatoes, tons of peppers, and blackberries. Baby avocado and lime trees aren’t fruiting yet. Someone ate our cucumber plants as soon as they sprouted.
The answer is they were a wealthy European concept brought to the colonies as a status symbol. They are still associated with wealthier people which raises property values, so are enshrined in local ordinances and HOA rules.
Why aren’t people everywhere?
Rodents mostly
It’s a stupid reason. Historically, if you were a peasant and had been granted access to land, you grew food or herbs. If however you were a lord, you got your food from your peasants. You had no need to grow your own food. So they could afford to grow lawns as a sign of wealth.
This has transferred across into the modern psyche. Lawns are a way of saying “i’m so rich, i don’t have to worry about sustenance. In fact i’ll throw money at it to maintain this slab of green rather than have it provide food, or shade.”
This is the correct answer. So many US’isms are bourgeois / aristocratic imitation.
Cars / wasteful transportation, lawns, sprawled out cities, high amounts of meat consumption, vacation homes / timeshares / exotic vacations, having servants, etc. These are things that are only possible for countries with huge amounts of land and resources, and not sustainable or doable for most of the world.
It could also be seen as rising standards of living, and aristocrats were optimizing their advantage before the standards rose for everyone due to cheap energy availability.
Saying people consume meat to mimic the rich is a little silly.
@Turturtley @Confidant6198 Its worse, because, actually, even if they wanted to, most Americans are under the tyrannical rule of a Homeowners Association (talk about liberty huh) that forces them to plant grass, and can fine them a shit ton of money if they do otherwise
It’s funny how this has come full circle - many people garden (in their back yards) to show they have the free time to do so.
Littering your yard with food attracts things like rats, raccoons, squirrels, etc, which destroy property and infrastructure, spread disease, and cause injury to people and pets. I’m not saying I’m against fruit trees, but I do understand people who are. It’s a legitimate concern. Some areas even have things like boars or bears which are extremely dangerous.
I’m also curious with the way you can sue people in the US what would happen if someone becomes sick after eating one of your fruits. I imagine it varies by state.
Trees in general do all of those horrible things you mentioned.
Dropped fruit all over the ground really encourages rats though.
My mum got a house super cheap when I was young because it had a “rat problem” it also had a peach tree in the back yard that the owner didnt pick up after. We removed literal garbage bags of peach pits from the roof space and crawl spaces of that house and garage.
Chopped the peach tree down (it wasnt a healthy tree anyway) and the problem basically disappeared in days.
And I’ve found loads of walnut shells in nooks and crannies. I’m not going to cut a black walnut down.
Buildings need to be built properly to exclude animals regardless.
Not possible. Nature finds a way.
Reading this made me even happier I don’t have to live there
This. Fruit trees are loads of work that most amateur gardeners don’t know how to deal with them or have the time to deal with them. Gardening and farming is a shitload of work and was only made cheap and easy through the marvel of modern technology. You don’t just plant shit and get to eat lol
We do? Some ppl dont, we have sugarcane, oranges, lemons, eggplants, peppers, and I forget the rest, my dad/grandpa are more into gardening. Its just not realistic to do a lot, cheaper and a lot faster to go the grocery storec more variety, hoemgrown stuff is ususlly more of an addon.
Yeah, I have a lemon tree and a small garden that gives me some herbs and some strawberries (that are pretty but don’t taste great). My parents were into gardening so they always had a big garden. I remember one of the problems they had is that a single crop would ripen in a short period. Like they’d get 200 tomatoes over 2 weeks. Not ideal (unless you’re into canning/jarring), but a good way to make friends with your neighbors.
