Guerrilla Grafters: Turning Urban Streets into Orchards

By Margret Aldrich
Published on December 29, 2011
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What do you get if you cross an apple tree with a littleleaf linden? The Guerrilla Grafters–a renegade urban gardening group in San Francisco–hope the result is a metropolitan food forest. The volunteer activists splice branches from fruit trees onto the non-fruit bearing trees that line their city streets in an effort to grow cherries, Asian pears, and other fresh produce for local residents, free of charge.

“We have tens of thousands of trees in San Francisco,” says Guerrilla Grafter Tara Hui, in a video shot by *faircompanies, “so that’s a huge resource that we could tap into to provide food.”

Not everyone is a fan of the project, reports Yi Chen on psfk: “In some states, it’s illegal to have fruit bearing trees on pedestrian footpaths as fallen fruits become a health and safety hazard, [and are] also believed to attract insects and rodents.” The Guerrilla Grafters, however, believe that enlisting community stewards to monitor the trees will prevent such problems.

To learn more about the project, and find out how you can replicate it in your city, visit the Guerrilla Grafters website and watch this video of Hui and Booka Alon as they lovingly check their grafts and seek out new fruit:

Sources: *faircompanies, psfk

Image by Muffet, licensed under Creative Commons.

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