By Katie Haegele
On the corner of 7th and Catharine Streets in South Philadelphia there’s a scrubby little parking lot with a white-painted cinderblock wall at the back, an ordinary city scene. But overhanging the wall is a tree, probably 15 feet tall, and many of its branches are heavy with clusters of luscious-looking peaches. The ones near the top of the tree are a darker red from the sun. It’s ten in the morning and it’s already hot, and I want one.
This tree is listed on the Philadelphia Food Harvest Map, a collaborative, user-interfaced Google map that allows people to add points in the city and suburbs where edible plants are growing on public spaces. That’s why I’ve come here, ready with my five-foot-long fruit-picking tool. The map was started by David Siller in the summer of 2007 and it now has dozens of entries. Some of the more charming ones say things like, “Nice apple tree - get it before the kids do” and “feral hops on the dog park fence.”
Actually, the map said there was an apricot tree somewhere around here, but all I see are the peaches. No matter; I stand on my toes, push the picker up into the tree, and knock one loose with its metal tongs. I feel it drop onto the cushion lining the basket. After a moment of hesitation — should I wash it? it feels weird to eat fruit without a supermarket sticker on it — I take a bite, and though it sounds hokey to say, it’s the sweetest peach I’ve ever eaten.
I hear a door open on the other side of the low wall. Shoot. “Is this your tree?” I ask the older woman who has appeared there, standing next to her back door. She nods and I shrug sheepishly, hand in the cookie jar. “I ate some.”
“I don’t mind. A lot of people came last year and did the same thing,” she says. Kathleen Vernier, who’s originally from upstate New York (“orchard country”), planted the tree just three years ago. She and her grandsons, Jackson Fordham, 13, and Franklin Mostoller, 12, are out here now with a step ladder, filling a bucket with peaches to make a pie. One of her two rescue dogs, a little one who looks part pitbull, is excited by all the activity — and in fact is running around with a peach in his mouth. Vernier didn’t know her tree was on the map but she says it’s fine with her.
I’d like to stay and talk and try some pie, but I have other sites to check out today, places in West Philly and Germantown that promise cherries, plums, raspberries, rose hips, and mulberries, lots of mulberries. I’m a bit of a sight with my backpack, tree identification book, and the picking pole, peering up into trees. But I’m not the only city kid with an interest in fresh produce these days. What I’m doing is called urban foraging, and cities all over the country are getting into it. Websites like neighborhoodfruit.com and fallenfruit.org facilitate the search in the same way the Philly Food Map does, but on a national scale.
Siller, who works on a contract basis as a farm educator for Weavers Way Farms, got the idea from a site called Green Map, which highlights natural places in cities all over the world. Siller doesn’t check on or edit the entries, though he has been to a lot of the sites by now. “I just did as a free-form thing, and hopefully people are honest,” he said.
“The only issue with it at this point is we need to make it our own thing. It’s Google, and it doesn’t feel like ours. I agree that it should be user-interfaced, but if thousands of people are looking at it it should be monitored in some way.”
Still on my own little tour, I walk up the lovely blocks of 48th Street, comfortable even in the July heat thanks to the tall shade trees lining the street. Between Hazel and Cedar streets, right where the map said it would be, I find a plum tree, but — cue sad trombone music — the tree is bare, and the sidewalk is covered in plum stains and pits. I’m about a week too late.
In leafy Germantown I take East Ashmead Street to where it dead-ends at the Wister Septa station. Little kids are playing ball in the street and a Caribbean food truck is parked nearby, but at the end of the block is a densely overgrown plot of land where a mulberry tree is supposed to be. I don’t find that, but I do find a sour cherry tree full of fruit. A man getting grocery bags out of his car tells me the tree bears plenty of cherries every year, but he’s also seen possums and raccoons in the undergrowth he’d like to avoid.
After a day of roaming I conclude that when the Food Harvest Map works, it works in part because users can add photographs, which helps make up for the necessary lack of precise addresses. It’s more of a wild goose chase when a user has misidentified a tree or the information has become outdated.
Phil Forsyth, the director of the Philadelphia Orchard Project who uses the map to show the locations of its orchards, made another suggestion.
“One thing to remember is that people who are really serious about foraging get to the fruit first. Some of them won’t put trees and bushes on the map in the first place. It depends on the person, but a lot of them don’t want to lose the things they took the trouble to find.”
So maybe I shouldn’t give this away, but in the alley next to the Fleisher Art Memorial there’s a great big fig tree growing right out of the sidewalk, creating a canopy with its broad leaves. I for one will be back there in the fall, when the fruit is fat and ripe and ready to eat.
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