Urban Foraging in Columbus?
After seeing an uptick in information (NY times article here, and a website here) about folks in California and Oregon engaging in urban foraging projects, I'm curious if anyone in Columbus has any thoughts or experience on the idea.
For those of you who are wondering, urban foraging is nothing more than finding edible fruits es growing wild or in public spaces (or, in some cases, trees in private yards with branches over public sidewalks). The various urban foraging programs in other, more fruit-prolific cities have organized groups that coordinate distribution of the bounty provided by these trees, enabling someone with a lemon loaded tree to swap fruit with someone that may have an abundance of cherries in their yard. (See the NYTimes article above about Asiya Wadud and her creation of the fruit exchange Forage Oakland.)
While I didn't refer to it as urban foraging, I was thinking about this a bit last year, when I noticed that a house one block down from mine had an apple and pear tree dangling out over their fence and over the sidewalk. At the time, I was a little too nervous to pick any of the sidewalk-side fruit, but think this year I might get up the guts to ask the tree's owner if I can help myself to some.
One website--Neighborhood Fruit, has a Google map with public fruit trees marked for easy foraging--in the SF Bay area and Portland, Oregon. A super-fast Google search doesn't indicate anything like this in Columbus, and after my "discovery" last year, I'm curious to see if anyone else out there has info about possible urban foraging opportunities here.
If you know of a public tree, or if you have an over abundance of some type of fruit, post a comment--maybe we can coordinate something like this here in C-bus!
For those of you who are wondering, urban foraging is nothing more than finding edible fruits es growing wild or in public spaces (or, in some cases, trees in private yards with branches over public sidewalks). The various urban foraging programs in other, more fruit-prolific cities have organized groups that coordinate distribution of the bounty provided by these trees, enabling someone with a lemon loaded tree to swap fruit with someone that may have an abundance of cherries in their yard. (See the NYTimes article above about Asiya Wadud and her creation of the fruit exchange Forage Oakland.)
While I didn't refer to it as urban foraging, I was thinking about this a bit last year, when I noticed that a house one block down from mine had an apple and pear tree dangling out over their fence and over the sidewalk. At the time, I was a little too nervous to pick any of the sidewalk-side fruit, but think this year I might get up the guts to ask the tree's owner if I can help myself to some.
One website--Neighborhood Fruit, has a Google map with public fruit trees marked for easy foraging--in the SF Bay area and Portland, Oregon. A super-fast Google search doesn't indicate anything like this in Columbus, and after my "discovery" last year, I'm curious to see if anyone else out there has info about possible urban foraging opportunities here.
If you know of a public tree, or if you have an over abundance of some type of fruit, post a comment--maybe we can coordinate something like this here in C-bus!
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