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Come fall in Vancouver, binners who hunt, and gather bottles, and cans in the back alleys and side streets are also in the right places to find the ripening fruit, hanging off countless trees, and bushes, free for the picking.

The efforts of Vancouver's urban gardeners finally begin to bear fruit in late August -- I can get away with writing that because tomatoes are a sort of closeted fruit that passes for a vegetable. Most of the obvious fruit -- apples, and berries -- are essentially feral, and grow, and ripen in Vancouver's impossibly fertile climate without any human assistance.

Blackberries, in particular, thrive all over Vancouver, in spite of wholesale culling efforts. Everyone loves the blackberries themselves but it takes tough love to keep the bushes, with their long, thorny, tendril branches, from spreading like wildfire. So what looks like an attempt to wipe out the entire blackberry plant species is merely light pruning. This time of year, blackberry bushes become a neighbourhood hangout,

[caption id="attachment_4610" align="alignnone" width="497"] The ripe berries vanished just after I snapped this photo. Yum![/caption]

Apple trees are also common in every neighbourhood I've been in. Lots of these apples will get picked, but it's my impression that most ripen, fall, and rot where they lay. When I'm sitting in the McDonalds at Broadway and Granville, I am less than one block away from apricot trees -- two varieties -- both delicious. Click on the images to enlarge them.

Vancouver's blackberries -- an invasive species ►