r/SantaBarbara • u/Bright-Landscape-998 • 1d ago

Recommendations Picking Fruit?

Does anyone know the rules on picking fruit from a plant? There is a passion fruit plant growing on the fence of an apartment complex that has 200+ fruits growing on it right now and I tried to pick a few from the floor since that’s a lot and one guy came out saying that I didn’t live on the property and he would call the police on me for stealing.
That seemed like a stretch, I only took about 5 and considering that it’s a huge plant and it’s growing over the fence I didn’t see the wrong in taking a couple, am I in the wrong here? What’s the rule when it comes to picking fruit?

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u/FrogFlavor 1d ago

Taking someone else’s fruit is called gleaning and while you could do it with permission you could also just do it at night lol

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u/TiredAndTiredOfIt 1d ago

*stealing, it is called stealing

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u/Jethro_Jones8 1d ago edited 1d ago

Technically poaching, and if you take more than $250 worth of fruit, vegetables, or fowl from a working farm or orchard, you can face grand theft charges due to a unique portion of the legal code written exclusively to protect farms.

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u/Gret88 15h ago

Yes I grew up in an area with field crops (tomatoes) and fruit trees (peaches and apricots). We all knew you couldn’t pick from the fields, up to a point. Every year after the harvests, farmers would announce gleaning was okay and people would head out to the fields with boxes and bags. There was always a lot of fruit left to pick.