Usually this is the time of year when I'd sneak up on unsuspecting friends to give them yet another bucket of apples, pears and just possibly quinces. This year, thanks to drought and bushfire gales that either broiled the fruit trees or sucked the sap from them with ultra-dry breath, our only apples are a few small confused ones from early February blossom. I doubt any will ripen, and the wallabies have already taken a bite out of two of them and decided they didn't want any more.
But to my surprise we still have harvests, and enough to give away. The potatoes were first, planted last August and doing absolutely nothing until this February. But we finally have some egg sized red potatoes - I can't even remember what variety they were. There aren't many, but they taste of earth and sunlight and are wonderful. A spud fresh from the ground is a luxury as great and any backyard-ripened tomato.
The natal plums have given a massive crop, round yellow fruit with tiny seeds. The only problem is that no one I know is familiar with natal plums and decidedly uncertain about trying even one of them, much less half a bucketful. Natal plums are South African, and like life hot and dry. 2003 was a superb year for natal plums. A bushfire year followed by rain seems to suit them perfectly. As long as it's hot, and they get at least one good soaking, they are happy.
Natal plums form a smallish tree in our climate, extremely insignificant looking except when the fruit are ripe - about two weeks a year, when they are dappled green and gold. The trees can be pruned to neatness, and make an excellent hedge.
Lettuces planted in March have hearted now. The bok choy is so prolific that I have finally remembered I don't like bok choi except with oyster sauce and preferably cooked by someone else. The native limes are doing what native fruits do best: nothing much till it rains and then bloom and fruit fast. The lemons must have flowered during a couple of days when I wasn't watching, because they suddenly have small fruit which hopefully will become bigger, riper fruit in winter and spring. We even have autumn asparagus...
It all tastes wonderful, except perhaps the 50th bok choy. But picking, eating, picking, sharing, filling baskets of produce to give and to receive is more than just deliciousness. These are harvests from what by any criteria has been one heck of a year: desperate drought; surgery; months of bushfire and evacuations; the loss of people I love and landscapes that felt part of me, and then pandemic.
And yet despite it all we will have new potatoes with our dinner tonight; a home grown lime sauce with the fish - though not more stir fried bok choi- and a rhubarb fool (layer sweetened cream with rhubarb stewed with orange juice, then top with a few chopped home-grown macadamias). We will eat with happiness, but also with the knowledge that this is a generous planet, when we humans allow it to be, and when we permit ourselves enough time to gather in its harvests.
This week I am:
- Wondering how to tell the cobweb-gathering, nest-building blue wrens that this is autumn, not early spring.
- No longer trying to plant all the lettuce seedlings. We have enough winter lettuce, and the surplus will just go to seed come spring.
- Hoping that the loquat trees that are flowering now instead of August will either bloom again in August, or that their fruit will set, survive and ripen through the winter.
- Picking roses, which are defiantly putting out buds and blooms despite the first frosts of the season.
- Snickering at the king parrots who have just arrived to eat the apple crop that isn't there. They are hopping from trees to tree, complaining each time that it's empty of fruit. But there are lillypillies and cumquats and calamondins, which may not be as fat and succulent as apples but are perfectly good parrot tucker. The parrots will have to take what they can get and stop complaining.
- Wishing that hydrangeas were as generous as roses. The leaves have returned on most of the drought-bitten hydrangea bushes, but they have yet to bloom. I can almost hear them muttering, 'We've had a terrible time. No flowers for you till spring.'
