Urban Gardening

For those of you new to Phoenix, you may not know that just about this time of year you can get all the free grapefruit and oranges you want over in the Arcadia neighborhood.

Some of the owners of these massive, lush properties have more fruit than they know what to do with. Many of these trees are left over from when this area was all orchards. Some are newer.

Had you driven last weekend along Exeter or Lafayette Boulevards between 44th and 64th Streets and you would have seen many massive boxes on palettes full of fruit, or just piles of fruit along the side of the street.

I was showing properties along there this weekend and we stopped to pick up about 30 grapefruit for my clients.

The idea here is to get the fruit off the ground so the roof rats don’t have anything to eat.  But it is a wonderful way to provide food and beauty at the same time.

Which brings me to my rant for the day.

We waste millions of gallons of water per year on decorative orange trees in Phoenix, as well as trees that could produce dates, figs, pecans and olives. Instead of just tossing these in the landfill, we could produce a millions tons of food for people to, you know, actually eat!

People have said to me that we don’t want more fruit trees because it will encourage roof rats. Well, decorative orange trees attract roof rats, we have to clean them up and we don’t get any benefit from them.

We just have to handle the edible fruit wisely: harvest it and get it picked up right away.

I think we should encourage a culture of urban harvesting in Phoenix. We are not talking about a massive undertaking here. Just a change in awareness.

I’ve harvested about 20 pounds of pecans from the two trees here at my condo complex. That, my friends, is a lot of pies.