“What fruits will you find here?”
“Oh, there are chiku, mango, rambutan, …”
The woman watches her son drawing, as she rattles off a list of trees in her neighbourhood.
Fruit trees are all around us in Singapore. From the mango to the chiku to the belimbing and rambutan, our island is peppered with hardy, tropical and delicious fruit trees, who bear ripe fruits every season.
While fruits technically aren’t allowable for the picking, there are many reasons to entertain ideas of more creative (and fruit-full!) ways of using what’s available and local to us, that are ripe to be cultivated for human consumption.
Over the years, members of Foodscape Collective have gathered and wondered the same. So in 2017, we co-organised a fruit tree mapping session with GOS (Gastrogeography of Singapore).
A mother and her two children pick out a string of fruit trees, in Singapore 
Fruit trees in Bukit Panjang 
Fruit trees in the Queenstown/Bukit Merah area
We imagine, if we were to do more fruit tree mapping, that we’d have little shared resources on how to pick fruits, how to nurture trees, how to spot ripening mango trees, how to check fruits for freshness and edibility. That NParks’ marvelous map trees.sg would be a go-to for every avid fruit-gleaner.
We have our ideas….
How to pick fruit: Fruit-picking etiquette
How to mark points: fallingfruit.org
How to talk to someone about fruit-picking: Quick n easy guide?
What else do you imagine is possible, if we could glean fruits from our roadsides? Why share fruit?
