Guerrilla Grafters Quietly Grow Fruit on City Trees Using RFID Tags, Arduinos
15th December 2015
The ornamental cherry, plum and pear trees lining the streets of San Francisco produce beautiful flowers. The blossoms span a spectrum of bright white, soft pink and violet-red. Their leaves change with the seasons and theirs branches provide shade over sidewalks. But the trees aren’t there to bear fruit that you’d enjoy eating.
An urban agriculture project has spent the last five years trying to change that. A group known as the Guerrilla Grafters are grafting branches from fruit-bearing trees onto city-owned ornamental ones.
One in four people in San Francisco face the the threat of hunger or poor nutrition, according to the SF-Marin Food Bank. The scofflaw project is intended to let anyone who’s hungry pick free fruit in the public domain.
And a lot more. For members of the Guerrilla Grafters, the project is also about promoting public spaces, ecological diversity, and getting the public engaged with the environment.
And, not coincidentally, sticking one in the eye of the local government in a non-destructive way.