Moral-Legal, would you?

Well, this has been a fun little exercise! I think that I will stop at the courthouse and inquire as to the status of the property. If it is owned by an individual I will try to contact them. If it has been foreclosed upon I will help myself.

I have no moral compunction against robbing a bank, at least in this situation.

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At Vacant Homes, Foraging for Fruit

As she does every evening, Kelly Callahan walked her dogs through her East Atlanta neighborhood. As in many communities in a city with the 16th-highest foreclosure rate in the nation, there were plenty of empty, bank-owned properties for sale. She noticed something else. Those forlorn yards were peppered with overgrown gardens and big fruit trees, all bulging with the kind of bounty that comes from the high heat and afternoon thunderstorms that have defined Atlanta’s summer. “I don’t think of it as stealing,” she said. “These things were planted by a person who was going to harvest them. That person no longer has the ability to. It’s not like the bank people who sit in their offices are going to come out here and pick figs.”

The point, she and other urban fruit foragers say, is to keep food from going to waste. Ms. Callahan, who works for the Carter Center and lived in Africa for eight years, has seen true hunger and cannot bear to watch food rot. “If food is going bad on the vine,” she said, that says something about us as a society. “It doesn’t matter if the bank owns it. We should be more communal than that.”

“If I lived next to somebody who had abandoned fruit trees, I’d go get some myself,” said Jim B. Miller Jr., the chairman of Fidelity Bank in Atlanta. “You shouldn’t be starting a garden on somebody’s property, and you can carry this too far, but if there’s fruit on that tree, it ought to be eaten.”

I'm not with the trespassers, but I am with the gleaners. letting it go to waste is a sin. I guess I do qualify as a trespasser- a couple years ago I mowed my side of the lawn next door when the bank that owned it didn't bother. The guy two doors down was a trespasser too, mowing his side of that lawn. I'm sure glad nobody shot at us.

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The garden's getting bigger this year. Again.

I respect no trespassing signs so I don't think you would ever meet me.
If I had to come on your posted property, I'd be hollerin' Hello, anybody home?!

I wish people had wanted to pick our fruit when I was a kid. Maybe I wouldn't have lost some of my dogs.

Up in the north country we have city folks that come up in the fall to see the fall colors. We call them apple-knockers, 'cause they also think that if you don't live on the property the apple aare free for the taking. Someone owns the land and the apples on it. They may choose to let them rot, but they aren't yours.

do you pay taxes? then you help pay for them & have a MORAL right to them. you may or may not have a legal right (most laws like BFF pointed out are safety based not property right issues) but as long as you move quick and are careful you should be okay. heck most cops don't know the law and probably won't bother you except to warn you that you're being "unsafe."

ETA
private property defintely get permission. that said, whether some level of govt owns the right of way varies depending on the type of road and from state to state. in some cases the right of way and whats on it has been stolen from the land owners and is now public property. this is absolutely true of interstates. not likely to be true of small two lane undivided roads. so you may want to look into that as well.

Several bunches of elderberries are needing picking on other people's property right now.

Personally, I'm going to knock on doors and see who owns the property and if it's ok to clip the berries for some jam.

I've have 50 acres in this township and sure as Hades don't want people traipsing onto my property without having any permission to do so. I think that the same should be reciprocated.

Times change. Fifty years ago, I could pick apples, blackberries, wild grapes, hickory nuts, walnuts, butternuts, and whatever from just about any farm in the entire township. With every old homestead having at least one equally decrepit orchard, it was just the human thing to do to let someone salvage all they wanted. Having raided a good many apple trees, only had one time when the owner asked that I don't take all of the Greenings.

Right now I have two super apple stops here in the city. The first is owned by a bar and motel complex and the groundskeeper is happy that he doesn't have to mow over the darned things. Second is a case where residents don't even know what variety they are. They probably would have been grubbed out when the street was put in had they not been apple trees. Parked beside them one evening two years ago and started filling pails near the curb. Dog started barking at me and owner poked his head out to see what was going on and told the dog to shut up and went back into the house. No deer going to salvage those and not enough rabbits in the whole county could eat so many. That stop netted 15 gallons of juice from Golden Russets.

There was a time in the 1980s and 1990s when an old friend would walk all over town and her love was pears. Being in her 80s at the time, nobody would deny her the chance to come back later and pick some. "Come back later" meant with me and lots of pails or bags! We did have a slight problem at one old but prolific pear tree. House was a rental and those residents didn't have a clue. They just knew that they paid rent to an account at the bank but the bank was not the owner but they had to maintain the lawn. From that moment on, one may as well have said that that was our tree into perpetuity as long as we picked up the "mess" that the bushels of pears caused!

Martin

And, how much is a good night's sleep worth?

I would make every attempt to find the owner and get permission. Failing this and if those apples were left unpicked year after year, I would start picking them as I do not believe in waste. (Just leave some for the local animals please.)

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[[[[......farm that appears to be abandoned. It has been occupied but not lately. My guess is foreclosure. .....]]]]]]

You don't even know that there is no one who owns it. Appears? Guess?

I've got a problem with people who think that because they can see my fruit trees, that they can open the gate, come in, and take all they want. I certainly don't appreciate it and they are thieves who are stealing what doesn't belong to them.

Take a few minutes to find out who owns the property and ask permission.

So all of you would steal from me? You have no Idea how disapointed i am.

You should probably read posts better if you're go to use them as an example.
I said specifically that if it was a FORECLOSURE I would pick them. So no...your apples would be safe from the likes of me. I would worry that someone was an absentee owner and planned on picking the fruit himself.

My original quote:

Sorry Lisa.

I goofed when I put your comment in with the others.
What I ment to say was that I disagree with your implied premiss that that the apples will go to waste . Whats wrong with my desire to feed the local wildlife ?

Agreed.

When I was a teenager, my dad took us out to the property where Grandma grew up. The house was still there, but incredibly dilapidated, and IIRC someone in the family still owned the land. There was a pear tree with ripe fruit on it, and those were the best pears I've ever tasted.

I agree, stealing is stealing.

Taking those apples without permission is the same theft as the person who stole the heavy C-clamps out of my flea market booth this week.

How overgrown do you let your booth get?

Go to your local tax assessor website for your county and type in the address of the property, if you don't have the exact addy you can look up one near it and look at the map to find it. That will tell you who owns it and that way you can ask

I wouldn't do it without asking. I wouldn't want someone to take my things without checking/asking. A farmer plowed up part of our property this year because "we weren't using it" and it really made me upset.

If you need help looking it up I'll help you if you'd like I've looked up lots of them to see what house taxes would be when we were house hunting!

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Never thought of someone planning to come later to harvest- obvious with an orchard but not so obvious with an overgrown untended fruit tree (esp. with last years' deadfalls having left remains around). I would knock on the nearest house and ask permission to be told yes go ahead, or it's Mr Jim's the house down the road (then go ask him), or 'noone lives there or goes there but leave a few for our grandkids please'.

However I have stopped at an overgrown rotting house and picked the camellias there. And should have been motivated enough to take cuttings of those lovely 20 ft tall bushes for my place. After three years someone was clearly cleaning up the place and now seems to live there so no more camellias for me (or rather for the road side marker for one of DD's classmates).

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I would ask for permission. Not only are they not your apples or your property, but whoever owns it might be worried about the liability of somebody on their property. Just recently there was an issue with a neighbor of mine. They thought it was ok to cut through another neighbor's property to access theirs. Most of the time the other neighbor wasn't there so nobody to stop them. When the property changed hands and a person saw the car tracks they came asking me about it. No trespassing signs went up within the week as well as a fence across where they were driving through.

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