A post did the rounds recently asking whether a group of growers should start planting fruit trees, herbs and vegetables on public and community land around town, and just leaving the produce for whoever finds it. It’s a generous idea, and it comes up often enough that it’s worth answering properly instead of just cheering it on.
Short version: the idea is not new, it has been tried in Australian cities for close to twenty years, and the honest answer is mixed. Some of it works well. Some of it runs into the same handful of problems every time. Below is what the evidence actually says, answers to the specific questions that were raised, and a case for why your own front yard and back yard, shared with a few neighbours, gets you most of the benefit without most of the risk.
Has this been tried before?
Yes, repeatedly. Guerrilla gardening, planting food on land you do not own or have not been granted permission to use, has a real history in Australia. In 2008 Sydney sustainability campaigner Michael Mobbs planted a “road garden” of vegetables on a Chippendale street verge without council approval. It attracted enough public support that the City of Sydney changed its policy to formally support street food gardening instead of fighting it. Melbourne’s inner northern suburbs have had informal vegetable plantings on public land for years, and groups like Permablitz have built a whole model around volunteers converting suburban yards to food gardens for free (Wikipedia, Guerrilla gardening; Sustainable Gardening Australia).
So it can work, and it has changed council policy before. But the Sydney and Melbourne examples that stuck also share something in common: they became visible, organised, and eventually legitimised. The plantings that get pulled out are usually the ones nobody in authority ever heard from.
The pitfalls, honestly
Land ownership and council rules
Planting on land you don’t own or haven’t been given permission to use is, legally, cultivating someone else’s property without consent (Wikipedia). In practice councils rarely prosecute a lettuce, but they will remove plantings that block sightlines, sit on drainage easements, or turn up in a mowing contractor’s path. Some councils, including the City of Moreton Bay, actively support resident verge gardens and publish guidelines for them, but the guidance is built around ornamental and native planting kept low, soft-edged and non-hazardous. Food plants specifically aren’t addressed in Moreton Bay’s public verge guidance, which is worth noting rather than assuming either way (City of Moreton Bay, verge gardens). If you want to plant on a verge or a piece of council land, ring council first and ask what’s allowed on your specific strip. It costs one phone call and removes all the guesswork.
Liability
This is the one councils raise most often. If someone slips on fallen fruit on a footpath or nature strip, who is responsible? It is a genuine grey area, and it is the reason several councils have been cautious about endorsing fruiting trees specifically, even where they are relaxed about herbs and ornamentals (ABC News, 2019).
Fruit fly, and why an unmanaged fruit tree is a bigger deal in Queensland than it sounds
This is the pitfall that gets missed most often, and it matters a lot here. Queensland’s own biosecurity guidance names abandoned, unmanaged or neglected fruit trees on private property, in parklands and in community gardens as key risk areas for Queensland fruit fly to establish and spread. The recommended management response for a fruit tree nobody is actively monitoring and treating is to remove it, not to plant more of them and walk away (Business Queensland, Queensland fruit fly). A community planting of apples, stone fruit or citrus that nobody sprays, monitors or picks over regularly is exactly the kind of host site that lets fruit fly numbers build up and spread into everyone else’s backyard trees, including yours. This does not rule out fruit trees on shared land, but it does rule out “plant it and let nature do the rest” for anything in the fruit fly host list. Herbs, leafy greens and most vegetables do not carry this risk.
Food safety of produce nobody is watching
Produce growing beside a road picks up whatever the road puts into the soil and the air over time, and produce nobody is checking can carry disease, mould or contamination from dogs, foxes or birds without anyone knowing. None of that shows on the fruit. This is a real reason food-growing verge guidance for councils tends to steer people toward herbs and non-edible planting near roads specifically.
Directly answering the questions that were raised
Could something like this actually work? In the sense of a few trees surviving somewhere and someone eating the fruit, yes, that happens all the time and mostly goes unnoticed. In the sense of a structured, ongoing group project that keeps producing food for years without turning into a maintenance burden or a council removal, it needs more structure than “plant it and let nature do the rest”.
How would you structure it? The Sydney and Melbourne examples that lasted did it in the open: named organisers, council contact, a small group that actually turns up to check on the plantings. The ones that get pulled out are the anonymous, unmonitored ones. If you’re set on public land, go open.
Open and seek permission, or independent and guerrilla? Open, for two concrete reasons rather than a general preference for following rules: liability sits with someone identifiable either way, so it may as well be handled properly, and fruit fly host trees on public land genuinely need a person accountable for managing them, which an anonymous planting cannot provide.
You don’t actually need public land for this
Here’s the part worth sitting with. The goal behind the original idea, more edible plants in the community and more fresh food reaching people who want it, does not require public land at all. Most of the growing capacity is already sitting in front yards and back yards across Dayboro. Nobody’s garden produces the same six things all season. It produces gluts: too many lettuces one week, forty tomatoes the next, and nothing useful for the weeks in between. A neighbour three streets over usually has exactly what you’re short of, and vice versa.
That’s the actual problem a public food forest is trying to solve, mismatched supply and no easy way to move it between growers, and it’s already solved on private land, with none of the council, liability or fruit fly exposure above, through Grow Together.
It works like this. Someone nearby starts a group and invites people they can actually reach, not strangers off a public list, because a swap only works between people close enough to drive to each other. Once you’re in, you choose which beds the group can see, post what you’ve got spare, and take what you’re short of. Joining and swapping is free, always. Starting a group needs a paid plan, so one person carries that cost and everyone else joins for nothing. There’s no public directory and no browsing strangers’ gardens, on purpose, since it shares real information about your garden and roughly where you live.
A backyard is also, legally, entirely yours. Nobody is stepping on a slippery fallen mango on your driveway that a court needs to sort out. Nobody is asking whether your loquat tree is a fruit fly risk to the block, because you’re managing your own tree already. All the upside of the original idea, more food grown, more of it reaching people, less waste, with almost none of the downside.
If you still want to plant something on shared or public land
This isn’t a hard no. If the pull toward public planting is still there:
- Ring council before you plant, not after. Ask specifically about your street, not the general policy.
- Stick to herbs and low ground crops on verges and nature strips. Skip fruit trees on land nobody is committed to managing, for the fruit fly reason above.
- Go open, not anonymous. Name a small group, and have someone check on the planting regularly.
- If you want fruit trees specifically, look at a formally set up community garden or orchard plot rather than scattered street planting. That gives the trees an accountable manager, which is the piece unmanaged public fruit trees are missing.
Skip the council calls. Swap with the neighbours you’ve already got.
Grow Together turns your glut into someone else’s dinner, and their glut into yours, without ever leaving your own fence line.
Garden Buddy, backyard growing help for Dayboro and beyond.
Published 27 June 2026. Last updated 27 June 2026.
