There are always exceptions and exceptionable people. Personally I grew up
on Air Force bases and the only place I was ever able to participate in
filching fruit was in Crete where a farmer had his grape vines close to the
fence at the base perimiter. When he saw what was going on he just pruned
the vines back where small arms couldn't reach them through the chain link.

We did have a neighbor in Colorado who got very upset when the local kids
ate all the fruit off the wild cherry bush by her front door. She was going
to make either a pie of jam, I can't remember which. The houses on base all
had either lilac or wild cherry bushes by the front doors and crabapple
trees in the yards. The cherries were all pit

Shell


"paghat" wrote in message
news
In article , "Vox Humana"
wrote:

"Frogleg" wrote in message
...
On 21 Aug 2004 11:54:40 GMT, (GrampysGurl) wrote:

Wow!!!! That's bold. I'd make a cute little wooden sign that said
"Thou
shalt
not steal" and put it up

Part of the problem may be that many don't see 'sampling' as
stealing. You have so many -- you won't miss "just a few," and it's
far too much trouble to stop and ask. If the poster's tree(s) is/are
near the road, it may be impossible to stop without physical barriers.

Many people feel free to just dig up plants and cart them off also,
assuming
that no one really owns that "abandoned lot" or road-side ditch.

Some random things this thread made me remember:

1) I planted plum trees by the road with the expectation that kids walking
to school in the morning & others afoot would pick much that's in arm's
reach, & I think that's fine. They're for the neighborhood.

2) A friend who was convinced someone in the neighborhood came into her
yard & picked ALL the cherries off a tree, leaving not one, put up a sign
with an unhappy/angry message, hoping the thief would read about the
owner's feelings. But I don't think there is really any doubt that birds
got them.

3) Once when I was test-driving a car I was about to buy, its rumpled
owner in the passesnger seat, he suddenly called excitedly for me to pull
over to the curb. He jumped out of the car & began gathering up rusty
apples that had fallen from two small trees. He did not pick from
branches, took only what had fallen. He jumped back in the car & a little
embarrassed by his own actions explained that the apples had been going to
waste, & he'd been eating them for both lunch & dinners. The degree of his
rumpledness & the emergency need to sell the car became more obvious.

4) As a child, many neighborhood kids were afraid of Mr Lambert who lived
reclusively in a small unpainted house in the middle of an orchard of
mixed fruit trees. He was actually a kind & lonely man, but I'll forgo
telling a dozen Mr. Lambert stories & skip to the end, when it took a
couple weeks before anyone even noticed he hadn't been out in his gardens
for a couple weeks, & sent someone to find the body. In decades to follow,
after his abandoned property went wild & his house fell down into a heap
of rubble, the fruit trees continued to produce every year. As an adult I
used to drive out to his place seasonally to harvest apples, pears, &
cherries of sundry kinds, with no one's permission. After about
twenty-five years of free harvests, I went out there one last time & saw
that in the one intervening year since my last journey, the woodsy orchard
had vanished without even one tree left, & a dozen ugly prefab houses were
arranged around a cul de sac. I wonder often if I'm the last person on
earth who remembers Mr. Lambert.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
Visit the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com