Real Spring

It's been a strange, strange set of weathers these past six months and now spring has brought us everything at once, it seems.  Normally, the cherry tree, the plum trees, the pear trees, and the apple trees bloom more or less sequentially.  But this year they're all blooming simultaneously.  That's good if you're primarily interested in the aesthetics of blooming fruit trees.  However, if you had in mind the fruits that they will produce some months hence, it's a little dicey because you run the risk of rain for all of them and an absence of bees to do any pollinating. 

It's been kind of off and on overcast these past few days and I haven't seen a lot of bees around (although they were around early in the month).  Well, we will see and if there is little fruit, we will have to sit around in August and think about the glorious blooming season we had, instead of the luscious fruit that we will not have.

Not only are all the fruit trees blooming simultaneously, but so are all the tulips: the earlies, the mid-season, and the lates are all blooming right now, which makes for a nice addition to the fruit bloom.  And there are blue forget-me-nots everywhere, and lunaria (the purple flowers in the center of the picture), and the elder berry flowers at the back.  All the green in the foreground is columbine (blue, blue-violet, mostly, but with some pink) and they will be blooming too within a few weeks.  We are overwhelmed with the sights out of the window.  What good fortune to live amongst all this beauty.

On other news fronts, someone has come along and (rudely?) ripped both previous signs off the drenched couch and its ever-more-soggy companion love seat.  It makes it seem as if this furniture couple has now come to claim residence on the roadside easement.  Nobody is going to take it home as a new possession, nobody is going to reclaim it as an old possession.  If we ever get bus service, the powers that be could make that corner a bus stop and we would all have someplace to sit while waiting to catch the bus. 

Fruit Flies

Now has come the time of gray days and wet days and leaves falling everywhere.  It’s hard to get anything done if I’m in a room with a window because the falling leaves constantly distract me: ‘What was that over there in my peripheral vision?  Oh, another leaf falling.’  Since there are about 3 million leaves fairly close outside the house, this can be more than a little repetitive as each one makes its way groundward, and as it goes, requires me to acknowledge its presence.  If I really need to get something done, I have to keep the curtains closed, which only increases the overall darkness.

Also, it is the twilight time of the apple and pear and plum abundance.  They ripen and fall off the tree, perfect, ready to be eaten; but inside the house there are yet all their siblings that fell off the tree yesterday and the day before, and we just can’t eat them fast enough.  And thus do the fruit flies come to join us in the despairing activity of hovering over the fruit.  I’ve eaten and frozen lots of plums and lots of applesauce, but yet there are plums and apples.  I don’t believe one can freeze pears (or at least can’t imagine the outcome), so the excess just goes bad quickly and is almost wept over.  Perfectly wonderful pears going bad: that can’t be the sign of a well-planned or well-lived life.

The apples are the most likely to be rescued because George and Rose invite us over to a grand apple juicing evening with their beautiful apple press and their excess apples and their hovering fruit flies.  We spent such an evening a couple of weeks ago and came home with six half-gallons of fresh apple juice.  The evening’s full haul was 35 half-gallons, and about half of that went to the food bank.  Of course, we can no more drink up six half-gallons of fresh apple juice than we can consume all those excess pears, but the freezer has a tall shelf that accepts what cannot be drunk immediately.  And all through the dark season to come, we will be slowly allotting  that juice into our eager cups, and remembering October.  And thanking Rose and George.

Eating Local

We could do it, but it means that we would be having fruit salad and a limited supply of vegetables (kale, lettuce, and zucchini) three meals a day.  Low on protein, of course, but awfully good food.  Fresh, full of taste. 

Here on the Sunshine Coast, people have apples and plums, especially, coming off the trees right now, and blueberry bushes are coming to the end, but still shedding ripe fruit.  Many kinds of apples are around us and either golden or Italian prune plums, for the most part.  The bears, of course, are out scouting their own meals and it would be okay to share if they weren’t so prone to breaking the tree down in the process.

Each year, the Okanagan Fruit Man shows up here on the Coast.  He comes from the Okanagan Valley, east and north of Vancouver, where they have towns that have names like Fruitland.  And the Fruit Man brings the fruit over to us on a Wednesday morning, setting up his truck by the side of the road and staying until it is all sold or until it is Friday afternoon.  I never quite figure out why it is that the Okanagan Fruit Man with his relatively small operation is able to bring us spectacularly fresh fruit from 150 miles away (I’m guessing at the distance), but the local supermarket has to store whatever fruits it has 3 or 4 weeks somewhere before it shows up on the store’s shelves.  The economies of scale surely do lead to low quality.

This week, while the Okanagan Fruit Man is providing us, for the last time this year, with several varieties of pears and apples, as well as peaches and nectarines, the local (Canadian) supermarket is, instead, offering us the same varieties of fruits, but only from the U.S. and from New Zealand.  They haven’t been picking apples in New Zealand for several months, I’d think, since that country’s farmers are now going into spring.  And how is it that the U.S. apples get up here but the B.C. apples can’t?  In the store yesterday, there were maybe 8 varieties of U.S. apples, not all of them even new crop, and only one B.C. apple, a small bin of Galas.  The U.S. and New Zealand apples were up around $2.00/pound; the B.C. galas: 78 cents.  And they were fresh and juicy and great.  Something about this business doesn’t make sense. 

Maybe the work of Archer-Daniels-Midland?  (here and here.)

Fruits of Fall

Well, here we are past the beginning of September, at the end of the Labor Day Weekend, and Point Roberts is closing down.  The skies continue in their greyness, although there is little or no rain and the temperatures are quite moderate.  It just doesn't look very encouraging, but it's actually quite pleasant weather. 

I went out for a walk and, in a half hour on the streets, did not see a single moving car.  I did see lots of houses that are closed up; lots of boats brought home to roost; trucks in driveways hitched to third wheels or trailers.  Time to go home.

On one street, there were big tomato plants with ripe tomatoes in even bigger pots, left out at the curb (if there were curbs) like the weekly trash for pickup (if there were a weekly pickup of trash).  My guess is that they are out there as a gift for the passing walker, fruits of fall after the farmers have gone back to their real homes.

Our yard is effulgent with fruit.  I gathered up a box of ripe apples from one of our several apple trees and left it out on the road (where the trash would be picked up, etc.) and within 8 hours the box and its contents were gone.  Must have been people; raccoons would have left the box.  But raccoons wouldn't have eaten the apples because either they don't eat apples or there are far too many apples around for them to bother with those in a box.  We have more apples and plums than we know what to do with, as does pretty much everyone I know.  The pears are scarcer on the ground, as well as on the tree.  Pears seem to be more finicky.  We have at least one ripe fig, and people who never get grapes are reporting bunches on their vines (we have one bunch with about 6 grapes).   And the blueberry bushes, the both of them, are still heavily laden with fruit.

So we are enjoying the fruits of fall; the actual fruits and the indirect fruits of quiet.  Both much to be desired.

Cherry Invasion

Today, Monday morning, the cherries continued to ripen and the robins continued to peck at them and ed continued to go up on the ladder to gather them, and I continued to eat them and freeze them and make them into jam, and, then we were all joined by a raccoon family who had heard about the good and free eats. GREAT pictures here (by ed).

Temperament

I’m not sure that I have a farmers’ temperament. I’m not sure that I actually know what it is, insofar as I’ve not known any real farmers since I was a teenager, and even then I just knew them in passing—someone’s dad. Reading novels gives me the idea that they are patient, enduring, adaptable, and accepting because their occupation is uncontrolled by them and uncontrollable by them. It usually rains after you plant seeds, but some years you plant the seeds, they germinate, and then you have a flood and they’re all washed away. Or there is no rain and they all dry up and blow away. I grew up in a high desert where there wasn’t much water and where winter wheat was the main crop. If you were going to grow something else, you had to irrigate. And that was before those big irrigation pipes that make the crop circles you see when you fly over southern Idaho, Utah, and parts of Colorado.

As a result, I’m an unlikely farmer in the Northwest where there is essentially too much rain and too little sun for my kind of crop farming. Mostly, I don’t do much growing of edibles because our schedule is too variable for me to take care of them. But when we bought the house next door, it came with a full farm—or maybe farmette: 3 apple trees, 3 plum trees, 2 pear trees, a huge cherry tree, 1 walnut tree, 1 fig tree, a grape vine, and a pecan tree. The last three don’t do anything reliably, but the apples, plums, cherries and pears provide us with a lot of fruit most years.

This year, though, I’m a little concerned and thinking about patience, endurance, and acceptance. Normally, the cherry tree starts first, blooming in the second or third week of April, quickly followed by the plums, and then the pears and finally the apples. There’s some overlap, but the entire process usually ends by mid-May. And with that length of time, there's bound to be at least one of the crops that gets terrific weather when it needs the bees. This year, though, it all happened at once, but not until the first week of May. And now, the cherry is already finished and the apples are going to be getting to that point within the week.

Fortunately, it started with sun, but by the time every tree was in full flower, it started raining, it got cold, and there was no sign of a bee for four days at least. It’s still too early to tell whether there was any pollination, but the cherries don’t look too promising. Here’s where I demonstrate my patience. By next week, I suspect I will be working on acceptance. And by August I’ll be full into endurance and looking to neighbors with different varieties who had different conditions than we did and thus have some fruit to share.

Nevertheless, a cherry tree in bloom, an apple tree in bloom, a pear tree , a plum tree in bloom: very close to being as much as you can reasonably ask for from a plant. How's that for adaptability?