Apples to Apples

This time of year, it amazes me how much fruit is left on trees around town. I wish there was a way to better hook it up with people who need food, since it seems positively shameful to waste nature's bounty like that. Yesterday I found an apple tree in an abandoned lot, just full of fruit. The leaves are all gone, so it looks like a Christmas tree except hung with perfectly bright red globes of fruit. I stuffed my jacket pockets as full as I could get them of the wonderfully tart/sweet apples, and I'm coming back next week with a bag. Applesauce anyone?

Nature's Cruel Joke

Out the bedroom window at night, the crickets sing the melancholy song of summer's ending. We spent our last lazy afternoon at the pool today, and will leave for possibly the last camping trip tomorrow. Just as the warm weather lingers and you want to be out grasping every last bit of summer's glory, your garden goes nuts and there's picking and preserving to be done.

A week or so ago, we were going plum crazy, with our yellow plum tree laden with little golden beauties. They aren't freestones so they don't dry well, just good for eating and jam. Fortunately my mom was visiting and helped me can some plum jam for the winter. Now the purple plum tree is bending down and I need to get picking those because we can dry those in the food dehydrator for wintertime snacking.

The Tomato Forest has been busy, I've picked 50 lbs of tomatoes so far and there's no stopping it. Fortunately, we have freezer space so I'm just throwing them all into gallon freezer bags and I will deal with them later when it's drizzly and yukky outside and I can stand to be in the kitchen all day. These variegated heirloom beauties were too gorgeous to make into a sauce though, so they became part of this 20-mile breakfast.



Everything on the plate comes from less than 20 miles away. Chard and tomatoes from garden, eggs from chickens, goat's milk from our local connection, feta cheese from the farmer's market, and sausage from a locally and humanely raised pig. Beautiful, sustainable, and YUM. P.S. I've eaten so much chard I think my eyes are turning green!

Worming Their Way In

So, there's not many things in life better than picking ripe black-red cherries right off the tree and popping them into your mouth, still warm from the sunshine. For years, our neighbors have let us pick off of their massive and abundant cherry tree, and it has become something to look forward to in the early weeks of the summer as we watch the cherries ripen.

Last year, the house was sold and the new owners had the tree trimmed right in the middle of summer, by just a gardener who obviously knew nothing about tree trimming. I thought at the time that the outcome was probably not going to be good. For one thing, the tree looked leggier after the trimming, and it wasn't a good shape, especially for a fruit tree. For another, the season for trimming is not while the sap is running strong during the fruit-bearing season.

Sure enough, this year the damage has appeared. Unpleasantly, we only discovered after eating many cherries from the tree (eewwwwww!) that nearly all of them have worms. So cherry processing this year took a lot more time and energy as I had to pit each cherry and remove worms instead of just using the cherry pitter on them. Also sadly, the tree only produced about a third of what it usually does. Now of course it's not our tree, so I'm definitely not looking a gift horse in the mouth here. But it's sad when something that has been a regular producer not just for the owners but for several families in the neighborhood is mangled just via someone's non-knowledge of managing a fruit-bearing tree. Several other fruit trees in the neighborhood underwent a similar fate this summer as owners with no knowledge of proper pruning and maintenance hacked away at them. As food prices grow, one can only hope that people begin to appreciate and cherish the treasure that a good producing fruit tree can be!

More Front-Yard Gardens Sprouting Everywhere

Time magazine has this story on "Edible Estates", discussing the return of gardens to front yards, and how it builds community. I know in my town, vegetables are sprouting up all over the place, and I think it's time I take out my camera and post a new edition of last year's "Grow Don't Mow" photo essay from my neighborhood.

In our own front yard, the cherry tree we planted with our dog Sabre's ashes last February is bearing beautiful fruit this year, and we've been enjoying "Sabre cherries" all week. All of my new evergreen blueberries fruited too so we'll be looking forward to tasting those soon! We went strawberry picking last week and got a flat of just gorgeous berries. It's amazing that many people may never know what real, fresh-picked strawberries actually taste like. Side by side with those overblown tasteless things they sell in the supermarket, there's just no comparison. I made up a big pan of shortcake, and we haven't gotten tired of it yet!

Taking a Page From Johnny Appleseed

As the news stories careen towards ever-scarier pronouncements (now even mainstream presses are admitting we might've passed peak oil, and objections to global warming have become the feeblest murmurs), one might wonder "What the heck can I do?"

When I was a kid, my grandparents and parents owned a theatre. During the summer months, they also did children's theatre productions. So I was a toy in Babes in Toyland, a dancing skunk in Johnny Appleseed, and a singing Gretel in Hansel and Gretel. Remembering the story of Johnny Appleseed (even though the version in the play is much dramatized from his real life), it occurs to me that we could all take a page from his book. Johnny Appleseed is known for planting orchards of apple trees, as well as fostering community, and helping out those less fortunate than himself (to the point where if people gave him clothing, he only kept the worst pieces for himself to wear and passed on the nicer items to others in need).

Right now, community and local food are two things that will be increasingly important as we head into an energy-poor future. For most of us, whether we live on suburban lots or in the country, we've got places we might be able to plant sustainable food sources for future harvesting. Of course, what is available to you to plant as part of your permanent landscaping will vary depending on your local climate, which direction your lot faces, how many shade trees you already have, and other variables. In our area, there are lots of options open for planting, including nuts like walnuts and filbert trees, a huge variety of fruit trees, and fruiting shrubs.

In a last fit of fall gardening, I picked up five more huckleberry bushes and three of a new variety of evergreen blueberry that fruits for 10 weeks a summer instead of fruiting in one short intense burst. I'm determined to both squeeze in more edible landscaping into areas that we have, and also to replace some of my least favorite shrubs (legacy of the previous owner) with fruit-bearing raspberries, huckleberries, blueberries, etc. We also planted a cherry tree this year, and I'm thinking of squeezing in a filbert somewhere. We have a yellow plum, purple free-stone plum. asian pear, and two red apple trees already.

Gleaning Time

When I was a kid, my mom was not shy about approaching people. Oftentimes, this was to my teenage mortification as she would actually talk to the person in front of us in the grocery line while I just wanted to curl up and fade away. But she was also not afraid to ask other people things that most people would not. Like "I see you've got a plum tree that no one is picking. Would you mind if we picked some of your plums?" I grew up in a big agricultural valley, so a bountiful harvest of fruits grew there that often fell to the ground, and my mom was not going to let that go to waste. We come from a long line of pioneer spirits (not to mention Depression-era survivors), and there's nothing more egregious than wasting anything, especially if it's edible. So we once gleaned 200 pounds of peaches from an orchard that had already been picked. And I once discovered containers of plums (from that unpicked tree) in our freezer, a decade after they'd been cut up and placed in old plastic margarine tubs for cold storage.

So when our new neighbors didn't look like they were going to pick the amazing harvest of cherries on the tree in their front yard, I didn't think twice about asking them if we could pick. And pick we have. And pick, and pick, and pick. I've put up about 12 quarts of cherries so far, and we've barely touched the tree. I only have a smallish ladder and the top 2/3 of the tree is quite literally going to the birds, but we've got cherries galore and they are simply gorgeous. So today I'm thankful for my thrifty German and Scottish ancestors, and for my forward-thinking mom who set such a good example (even if it embarassed me at the time) of not letting something go to waste when a simple question might yield a bounty.