Cherry? Plum? Cherry plum!!!!

Chris dropped a bike off today and asked if we would like to go pick cherries.  He had discovered a cherry tree with ripe fruit on the street.

We went and only managed to get a few cherries off the young tree.  It was too weak to climb well, and the cherries were too high to reach.  Between jumping, minor climbing, and Chris sitting on my shoulders, we managed to get a few, but our dreams of great spoils were unmet.

Then, on our way back, we found a much bigger tree.  Chris climbed up, with a boost from me, and threw down some very large cherries.  Looking around, I found another one just a bit down the street, which proved highly fruitious.  Now we had lots of cherries, enough for a pie or a cobbler.

These are things you never think about until someone mentions it.  Obviously, there aren't a lot of fruit-bearing trees on public land in, say, Indiana, but in California (and Mexico) you see a lot of trees--lemon, cherry, lowquat--just hanging out on the side of the road, with nobody to pick them.  All the fruit goes ripe, falls to the sidewalk, and gets smushed.  Nobody would think to harvest it!  In fact, we got a lot of strange looks from people passing by on the sidewalk, all of whom declined our invitation to take some of our bounty.

This is because of our attitude of scarcity.  We think value comes from the supply chain--something we pay for, that comes from an official source.  We need to move into a paradigm of abundance: urban gardens, food cooperatives, harvesting those feral fruits.  I had a great idea to create a website that used Google Maps to mark every fruit tree on public land, but this already exists.  However, it is scarcely used, so try and spread the word about neighborhoodfruit.com.

Oh, and it turns out they weren't cherries at all; they were cherry plums.  But whatever, we're still making pie.