One day last week I noticed squashed berries on the sidewalk right outside a community garden in my neighborhood. Suspecting it wasn’t the aftermath human-on-produce violence, I looked up, and lo and behold! There was an enormous tree, probably 30 feet tall, it’s long branches filled with plump berries. Apparently no one is tending to the tree, so the ripe fruit had been left to fall to the ground. The berries look something like blackberries, but I do believe blackberries grow on bushes. So–what is this big tree, and are the berries edible?
The next question is, if these are edible, do I surreptitiously pick some from this neglected tree? I don’t want to steal, but I hate to see food wasted. And it IS a community garden, after all, right?
This is an all too familiar conundrum. In my old neighborhood, Brooklyn Heights, there was this pear tree on the other side of a large stone garden wall that I used to walk by fairly often, which in Autumn would become laden with fruit, some of which hung over the wall onto the street side. It bothered me that no one was picking these luscious pears and I constantly threatened to no one in particular to buy an extending light bulb installer/grabber to pick some of these golden beauties. I never did get up the gumption to do it.
In the case of the berries, as with my other fruit-related saber-rattling, the picking will probably never come to pass.
Though I won’t be baking any community-garden pies any time soon, it would be nice to know what this is so at least I can impress people with my horticultural knowledge. If you have opinions or advice on any of the above questions, please say something in the comments below.
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