A popular YouTube video from 2011 about guerrilla fruit tree grafters has turned out to be their undoing.

The clever theory is that if you graft fruit-bearing branches onto city trees then people can eat for free. It would be public produce since it’s public property, similar to the 1968 Summer of Love efforts. The city doesn’t want the obvious liability.

Sadly, they recently discovered that the trees they grafted in the Hayes Valley area of San Francisco were severely pruned, including all of the grafted branches. This was unnecessary solely for ‘pruning” purposes.’ They lost all of the grafted Asian pears that were ripening there.

Apparently the now popular YouTube video about the grafters inadvertently gave away the location of these grafted trees. The video was never meant to circulate widely and advertise their activities. It was made for a demonstration the Guerilla Grafters were giving at a conference, but they never even used it.

They’ll be more careful next time, Tara assures.

Here is the video, where the grafters point out they are “not very selective” — their work is easy to spot with multi-color leaves — and that fruit trees bring rat problems: