Tips for making a fruit map
By Danila Oder, doder@usc.edu
December 2005

HOW to look for fruit trees

1. A bicycle is the optimal mode of transport for surveying a neighborhood. Walking is slow but thorough. In a car, you may miss something.
2. Educate yourself on how various fruit trees look at different times of the year. It’s easier to identify trees when they are in bloom or producing fruit. But some trees fruit in the winter and some in the summer!
3. It’s VERY helpful to be able to recognize the common non-fruit trees that are planted on city streets. See www.lacity.org/boss/StreetTree/treeguide.htm for photos of some of the most common non-fruit trees in Los Angeles.
4. Should you mark down a tree that only barely extends into public space? The tree could grow substantially. I would mark down the tree, unless it is very small.
5. What is public space? Anything beyond the property/sidewalk line. This includes the parkway (strip of land between sidewalk and curb), even though sometimes property owners plant on the parkway.
6. A bicycle is the optimal mode of transport for surveying a neighborhood. Walking is slow but thorough. In a car, you may miss something.
7. Educate yourself on how various fruit trees look at different times of the year. It’s easier to identify trees when they are in bloom or producing fruit. But some trees fruit in the winter and some in the summer!
8. It’s VERY helpful to be able to recognize the common non-fruit trees that are planted on city streets. See www.lacity.org/boss/StreetTree/treeguide.htm for photos of some of the most common non-fruit trees in Los Angeles.
9. Should you mark down a tree that only barely extends into public space? The tree could grow substantially. I would mark down the tree, unless it is very small.
10. What is public space? Anything beyond the property/sidewalk line. This includes the parkway (strip of land between sidewalk and curb), even though sometimes property owners plant on the parkway.
11. Take your map(see below) and two different colored pens with you on your bicycle. I use black and a thin orange gel pen. Use one (black) to mark the locations of the usable fruit trees you find, using abbreviations. Use the other pen (orange) to line out along the streets you’ve visited.
12. Choose your own abbreviations for trees (i.e., LE for lemon). Also decide how to mark particularly good trees or questionable trees (i.e., trees you aren’t sure are fruit trees and have to revisit perhaps in another season.). Remember, trees have to overhang public space!
13. Take your map(see below) and two different colored pens with you on your bicycle. I use black and a thin orange gel pen. Use one (black) to mark the locations of the usable fruit trees you find, using abbreviations. Use the other pen (orange) to line out along the streets you’ve visited.

Where to look for fruit trees

1. The Los Angeles Department of Streets and Sanitation Bureau of Street Services (BOSS) publishes an approved list of trees for planting on parkways, and NONE of them have edible fruit. (See www.lacity.org/boss/StreetTree/treeguide.htm). However, if someone plants a fruit tree on a parkway anyway, BOSS seems to leave it alone unless it is brought to their attention. Nearly all parkway fruit trees are there because homeowners have planed them in front of their house.
2. In Los Angeles, the places to find overhanging fruit trees are small houses with yards. (Make sure to check the alley if there is one.)
3. Apartment properties occasionally offer overhanging fruit trees; the most common in Los Angeles are figs, loquats and citrus. Taste the citrus first – if the trees are not pruned and maintained the fruit will not be edible.
4. In Hancock Park, a neighborhood of mansions, I found almost no public fruit. Home landscaping is designed for ease of maintenance, and backyards are surrounded by high walls.
5. Also look for fruit trees in public parks, back alleys (grape vines, overhanging branches and sometimes fig trees) and the walls of parking lots (passion fruit vines).
6. Look for other edible plants. Rosemary is a low, wiry shrub used for landscaping on many private houses, apartments and even commercial buildings. Feathery wild fennel is common in vacant lots. Edible weeds like amaranth and purslane (edible weeds) can be found in vacant lots, alleys and building sites. HOW to make the blank map
If you do not want to hand-draw your map, here’s how to use Mapquest or another online mapping site:
1. Go to the mapping web site.
2. Choose an address that you think is the center of a one-square-mile area you want to map. Adjust the address so you are exactly in the center of a one-square mile area. Adjust the zoom so that one square mile prints onto an 8.5 x 11 inch paper laid horizontally. (If you know there are a lot of fruit trees, you will probably need to zoom in and print a smaller area per page.)
3. Print TWO copies of the map. Make the lines good and dark.
4. Keep one copy at home for later; take the other one with you to mark up.
5. Repeat for all the square-mile areas you want to visit.
6. Go out and mark up all the streets on each map.

HOW to transform the marked-up map into an online picture

1. Now the finicky part begins:
a. Retrieve the second (unmarked) copy of your map(s).
b. To avoid using a copyrighted image, make your own JPG: Place another sheet of white paper on top of the second copy, and trace over ALL the streets neatly using a well-sharpened dark pencil or thin roller pen. The map is now just a bunch of lines without words.
c. Scan the tracing into your computer as a JPG.
d. Open the JPG as a slide. (You can also do this in Word but a slide is easier).
e. Create a text box for the name of the slide (i.e., “Adams Center from Bay Street to Zed Street”)
f. Now refer to your marked-up map. On the slide, create text boxes for all the street names, and place them where they belong. (Computer type in text boxes is easier to read than handwriting.)
g. Make tiny symbols for each type of tree, and place them individually on the map. (I use tiny black circles from the Drawing toolbar, with a white text box on top with the abbreviation, like this: Group the circle and the text box together, then make many copies on the side of the slide and drag them where you need them. Repeat for every type of fruit tree. This is a pain, but when you’ve done it once you can copy the circles to another map easily.)
h. I create a legend on the side of the page, i.e., LE = lemon, CA = Cactus, etc. with any notes to future foragers.
2. When you’ve transferred all the information to the scanned map, give it a title, and add any personal comments. Then save the slide as a new JPG. E-mail the JPG to fallenfruit.org, and you’re done with that map!