Whose fruits, whose labour? Negotiating community and care-work in urban orchards and food forests

Over the last decade or so, there has been an increase in scholarly attention towards urban food forests, orchards, and food-producing trees (FPT) in general. Research to date has included efforts to discern the social-ecological contributions of these trees and sites to urban life, as well as the barriers to their acceptance by local governments. Little attention is given, however, to the day-to-day relations and practices involved in tending such sites. Through the lens of commoning, our work attends to the everyday labours, relations, and tensions of collective efforts to care for urban FPT. In doing so, we ask how commoning (differently) manifests in community-led urban food forests and orchards. Through our analysis of ethnographic fieldwork conducted across three community-led sites in Naarm/Melbourne, we glean three (evolving and imperfect) accounts of commoning, highlighting how people grapple with tensions more prominent in open-access sites (i.e. sites with no fences, gates or formal membership). Rather than generating a fixed or ideal form of commoning, we offer insights into diverse practices, priorities, and relations, and some of the ways in which fairness, care, and community are understood, performed and ongoingly re-negotiated.