Neighborhood Fruit

This week's New York Times Food section had an interesting article on new networks dedicated to sharing or locating fresh produce in your area. One such resource is the site neighborhoodfruit.com, which allows users to post descriptions of the fruit ripening on their property.

The idea is that if you have, say, more peaches than you know what to do with for a few short weeks in July, you can register your peach tree and post an announcement when they are ripe, allowing your neighbors to come at a designated time and pick some of your bounty. Then, when their apples or blackberries are ripe later in the summer, they return the favor, building bonds in your community as well as diversifying the fresh produce available to you, free of cost.

Another section of the site allows you to map the location of known publicly available fruit in your city along with the dates when the fruit is ripe. There's a stand of mulberry trees in a park near me and the fruit usually goes to waste, so I posted their location online so any Pittsburghers interested in using the fruit can stop by and pick their fill. No other yinzers seem to be using the site yet, so I urge anyone who lets fruit in their yard rot or knows of public sources of fruit to register their trees so they can be mapped online.