There is a group of fruit lovers in San Francisco that practice something known as “guerrilla grafting” –  they graft fruit bearing branches onto fruitless, ornamental trees across the Bay Area city. Having access to free fruit sounds like a wonderful idea, considering the number of homeless people who can rarely afford a decent meal, but guerrilla grafting is actually illegal.

In many metropolitan areas, urban foresters make sure that flowering fruit trees don’t bear any fruit, in order to keep fallen fruit from making a mess on sidewalks and attracting vermin. Most public trees are fruitless, a fact that the Guerilla Grafters obviously don’t like. While authorities see urban fruit-bearing trees as a nuisance, these agricultural rebels see them as an opportunity to provide fresh, healthy produce for free to anyone who walks by.

According to their Facebook page, “Guerrilla Grafters is a grassroots group that sees a missed opportunity for cities to provide a peach or a pear to anyone strolling by. Their objective is to restore sterile city trees into fruit-bearers by grafting branches from fertile trees. The project may not resolve food scarcity, but it helps foster a habitat that sustains us.” Their mission, they say is to make delicious, nutritious fruit available to urban residents through these grafts…

As noble as their intentions may seem to most of us, guerrilla grafting is illegal and classified as vandalism by San Francisco’s Department of Public Works. It doesn’t matter who plants the tree, who grafts branches, or who maintains it, if it’s on a sidewalk, it’s publicly owned and messing with it is a crime. But as of 2012, the department did not plan to actively pursue grafters. “Unless someone is caught in the act, there’s not much we could do,” said spokesperson Gloria Chan, adding that it is hard to catch because the average person doesn’t know what an illegal graft looks like so it’s not likely to get reported.

However, some people seem to think guerrilla grafting is a very serious problem. “It gets very dangerous very quickly,” said Carla Short, an urban forester for the San Francisco Department of Public Works. “I mean the minute that fruit gets crushed on the sidewalk, it is slippery. We certainly don’t want people to get injured.”…

 

 

Source: http://www.ecosnippets.com/gardening/guerrilla-grafting-movement/