Fruit trees – SmartView Christchurch | Hacker News Reader

Fruit trees – SmartView Christchurch

smartview.ccc.govt.nz

I’m pretty familiar with the area- one of the more unique parts of the city is the “red zone”, a recovered area which became uninsurable due to the changes in the assessment of land risks post quake.

It’s a weird place as the roads are still there and the trees are still along the edges of the former gardens but all the houses are gone and the sites reverted to grass. Many of the fruit trees on this map are from those gardens.

You can get a good idea from google maps: Avonside Red Zone https://maps.app.goo.gl/bXcnExMeur9oNovp6?g_st=ic

You have to be quick to get the fruit there though ;)

Thanks for this. It’s really odd seeing the empty sections.

I’m alarmed at the state of the roads - what is going on? I thought ours were bad up in Auckland but those ones I just looked at in Christchurch are are terrible.

The roads in the red zone are no longer maintained. It's surprising how quickly road condition deteriorates.

Eh. I've been down a road that hadn't been maintained in over 40 years. I thought it would be worse. You can't relax while driving it because the bad sections are BAD, but between them are stretches of just fine, clearly old road.

Those roads in the linked Streetview are from 2013, btw. As they were a) low traffic and b) prone to liquefaction in aftershocks, they were low priority for repairs.

They're a lot better today.

Interesting to note that the street view is pre demolition so all the buildings you see are now gone - street view ghosts.

I switched to the latest and they didn’t seem very good.

Maybe I’m too critical.

No, you’re right - as an earlier comment said, the red zone roads are not maintained anymore since the area was demoed and they are currently pretty munted.

I can’t say that the rest of the city is pristine but it is a good bit better.

If every building has been demolished, I don't think neighborhood road condition is very important.

As a Brit that's moved to Australia, having a quick zoom around the street-view for that area was weirdly nostalgic. The greenery, some of the building styles plus the puddles on the road and the cloudy grey skies ... heck even the potholes ... reminds me of some places in Hampshire. There are more wooden houses though.

I also find the concept of the red zone fascinating. Is the streetview outdated? It still shows houses there.

I like the idea of this too, as someone who likes fruit trees and is looking forward to planting some on his own property in the coming years.

Christchurch has always been considered to be New Zealand's most English city.

Love that there's a "munted" medway footbridge: https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+'munted'+Medway+footbr...

Are feijoa's in season yet? Where we lived around Auckland there were these pathways with fruits just rotting - massive feijoas and best plums I ever had in my life. Unsure why, but owners chopped off the plum tree.

You get these roads with no houses left near airports too. Jets became a thing, the houses near the runways became unlivable.

Check out the area west of LAX or the one south of SJC

Everyone's pointing out other cities that also have this info. Falling Fruit is a cool project that aggregates all this data, along with user-sourced data, to make a really neat map

https://fallingfruit.org/

As an avid forager I really appreciate their inclusion of trees not typically considered foodstuffs. Here in socal, the landscapers love to use a lot of trees that they don't realize are extremely valuable food sources to Aboriginal Australians and I love being able to harvest the landscaping

They also include dumpster diving spots if you're into that

Melbourne (Australia) has a map of trees in the city, and you can email for information or to report anything about any of the individual trees: http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au/

I've heard these often receive notes of appreciation addressed to the tree.

Julian O'Shea has a great video on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4BtdFgVGjc

(His channel is great btw, interesting videos on cities, weird designs, etc).

Here's a swedish one too: https://fruktkartan.se/

It's completely privately operated and sourced, but at least in my area it's pretty accurate.

There was a news story about some municipality in the northern half of the country setting up a map like this, but only for a very limited area.

I think it's great, but please be respectful when going to another neighbourhood to pick fruit. I'm not sure if this is tied to Fruktkartan but the last few years I've seen fruit pickers come from other areas of the city and act very rough. For example they bring sacks, and apple picking equipment, and they climb the trees and break branches to get to the fruit.

On one hand fruit always ends up on the ground rotting, every year, so there should be plenty to go around. But on the other hand when people bring a whole sack, or crate, it feels like they're not just picking for themselves anymore, or that they're being wasteful and rough for no reason.

http://jillhubley.com/project/nyctrees/

NYC has a map of every street tree, including size.

I think London something similar: https://www.treetalk.co.uk/map

I think both of these are aggregated by https://fallingfruit.org/

FallingFruit also has crowd-sourced info on stuff like the best dumpsters for dumpster diving

https://cor.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=...

Richmond, VA does as well

Christchurch got royally creamed by some earthquakes a few years ago. As part of rebuilding they were trying to green the city as much as possible, and went as far as recruiting permaculturists to come live there. Someone I knew took them up on it.

I am going to be back in Chch in a few days for the first time in 5 1/2 years, it is going to be fascinating to see how things have progressed.

Was that just before or just after the quakes? My sense of time is garbage since Covid.

The earthquakes were 2010 and 2011.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Christchurch_earthquake

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Christchurch_earthquake

I wouldnt call hiring permaculturists going far for a city with a Wizard on a payroll :) sadly his contract wasnt extended in 2021 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/15/new-zealand-co...

I recently used Cairns city council's exhaustive tree map to match and identify a beautiful weed tree that had popped up in my front yard (to a tree in a nearby park). Turns out it's actually an edible fruit tree (a damson plum) so we've kept it. Tho it's already quite big and will start taking light from the mango tree soon enough, so decision is akin to an adoption!

By weed tree, I mean planted by a bird.

https://www.cairns.qld.gov.au/community-and-environment/tree...

You can graft onto that tree to get other varieties. It surprisingly simple and very satisfying.

If you’re really clever, you may be able to make it grow as a dwarf, or columnar tree.

I haven’t done those things and they might require something being done to the roots.

Interesting! Not very clever, but I've got an avocado and mango that seem to be surprisingly happy with a heavy handed biannual trim. Was hoping the plum would fall in line. The fruit are quite nice (albeit tiny!) and I've recently started spotting them on a couple of menus.

And yet to try grafting but do have a few citrus around that would be prime candidates!

Foraging for fruit in San Francisco is a joyful activity. Me and my partner would go on fun foraging dates regularly when we lived there. Knowing which trees have ripe fruits when is a handy skill to have if you want a super yummy experience. Today we live in a rural area outside of Seattle and foraging is a lot easier, takes no skills, but is a lot more boring and not nearly as yummy.

The fruit trees in the red zone are a bit run down in my experience. Fruit trees need a lot of care to do well: pruning, fungicide, pesticide, bird netting, irrigation etc. It's interesting to see which varieties thrive on their own. Plums and grapes seem to do well.

Oslo, Norway as well https://www.oslo.kommune.no/natur-kultur-og-fritid/trar-i-os...

Here you can choose which type of tree.

Related ongoing thread:

TreeTalk London – Tree Map - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34884966 - Feb 2023 (32 comments)

Toronto as well: http://www.mapto.ca/maps/the-fruit-trees-of-toronto

Does anyone know if they upload the data to OSM?

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