Follow Friday - Reach for a Peach!

Yes, it's Friday!  And that means it's Follow Friday 40 and Over at Java's blog Never Growing Old (one of my favourite blogs by the way!).


Right now we are in the midst of fruit season here in Southern Ontario.  So if you're visiting today from Java's blog hop, or from anywhere else, I invite you to "Reach for a Peach!"

Sweet and juicy, freshly-picked, these peaches are the first of many to come over the next few weeks.  Ours are not ripe yet because they are a later variety, but my brother who is a full-time farmer has a barn full of peaches, apricots, cherries, and plums right now.  We've had an early season for everything so it's a little bit chaotic down at the farm, but I visited there yesterday and enjoyed being a spectator while fruit was being picked, brought in from the orchards, and packed up for market.

Funny story - when we were in our early teens, the Ontario Fruit Marketing Board came out with this "Reach for a Peach" marketing campaign - they produced masses of T-shirts that all farm kids were supposed to wear when selling fruit.  Only thing was, apart from blazening "Reach for a Peach" across our breasts, there were also two strategically placed peaches on the front of the T-shirts!  My sister and I were mortified (I was 12 and she was 14) and refused to wear them after the first week when we received so many rude comments from disgusting old men at market.  So whenever I hear the words "Reach for a Peach!" I  always chuckle a little bit now, and shake my head too, wondering who in their right mind thought that a bunch of innocent farm girls were going to feel comfortable wearing T-shirts like that!

But if you don't like peaches, then I invite you to "Reach for an Apricot!" because they're ripe and delicious right now too!  We have 7 trees of them on our own property and half of them have been picked.  In another couple of days the rest of the varieties will be ripe and ready to go.  We are so blessed to live in such a great area for farming.  My husband says that at this time of the year, it's a little bit like living in the Garden of Eden - without any annoying snakes slithering around!  :)

The Sound of Moving in the Mulberry Trees

It's Marvelous Monday and our mulberries are ripe! Their sweet purple juiciness is something I look forward to all year-round. It's hard to explain why mulberries are so special to me.

I think the birds have a good idea without me saying a word.

And I know that my siblings completely understand.

But I'll try to put it into words so that you, too, can understand. We grew up on a fruit farm. As kids we knew we could eat any and all the fruit that we wanted, but primarily, the fruit was there for us to sell. It was our family business and our family depended on that income to survive. So we ate fruit like little piggies, but we also worked hard picking baskets of sweet cherries, peaches and plums, quarts of strawberries, bushels of grapes and apples, and wooden crates of sour cherries and pears.

When you're a kid and it's hot outside, picking fruit can seem like an endless day and a horrible chore. Looking back, I think we had idyllic childhood summers where we ran barefoot and free, feasting on the goodness of the earth with the frequent addition of huge bowls of ice-cream. I can close my eyes today and nostalgically conjure up in an instant the amazing taste of a fresh juicy peach warm from the sun, with it's tangy honey flavour and think to myself that it is truly indescribable. But back then, I was covered in itchy peach fuzz and sticky juice that had a way of insidiously creeping into the inside creases of our elbows, playing havoc with heat rash on a hot, humid summer day. And it didn't seem so grand.

Except - the mulberry tree. Our mulberry tree was the one tree on our farm that wasn't part of the economic equation. We didn't pick its fruit to sell for the family business. It was ours, all ours. Although, if we wanted to, as kids, this was one tree from which we were allowed to pick fruit and sell if we wanted to make some money to keep for ourselves. But mainly we just picked the mulberries for us, to eat fresh or to make mulberry pie, mulberry jam, or mulberry cheesecake.

Our mulberry tree was quite close to our house, not out in an orchard, lined up with other rows of trees.  Often in the evening after supper, we would all gather around the mulberry tree and have dessert. It was hot in our old farm house and we had no air-conditioning so by evening, it was actually considerably cooler outside.  The tree was big enough that we could all find a spot to eat and not really be in each other's space. We would gorge ourselves on mulberries until our mouths and hands and t-shirts were covered in purple.  It was a little slice of heaven on earth.

My dad pulled out the mulberry tree a number of years ago because it was putting too much shade on his strawberry patch. He figured since all of us kids had long moved out, nobody would mind. We were horrified! The sacred mulberry tree was gone. I think my dad has regretted taking it out from pretty much the moment he did it. Even the next generation down was upset as my oldest nieces had already started to appreciate the mulberry tree and all it had to offer. For years I would walk by the space where the mulberry tree had been, and shake my head in grief at its loss.

So, can you imagine my delight when I visited my husband's house for the first time and discovered this?

A gigantic mulberry tree! Bigger even than the one we had, this beauty was planted by my father-in-law who adored mulberries. How wonderful to discover that my husband's family had the same love for mulberries as mine! I love that my siblings and nieces now eagerly await my phone call to let them know that our mulberries are ripe once again.  When I walk out of my house at this time of the year, I never know if I might find one of my brothers with two or three kids tagging along, standing under my mulberry tree happily eating.  And when my husband comes home from work, he doesn't come into the house right away.  Instead he stands under the tree for a while and has a mulberry feast as an appetizer for his dinner.  Even my dogs love the mulberries and if will either graze on the ones that fall to the ground or jump up to pick them with their mouths from the lowest branches.

























So today, on Marvelous Monday, I am so thankful for our mulberry tree.  I've never been sure what it refers to in the Bible but I know that the "sound of moving in the mulberry trees" in our case, is the sound of joyful feasting, either of humans or birds or animals, all happy to enjoy the fruit of a wonderful tree.

Sunday Crop Report

Calling this post the "Crop Report" brings back all sorts of fun memories.   Growing up, I remember that our supper table at home was always one of great boisterous chattering and laughing.  There are 5 siblings in my family and every single one of us seems to have become great story-tellers.  Those skills were honed from infancy around our kitchen table, where my parents always encouraged us to talk about what we had done at school, who we had met, and whatever trivia was important enough to us that we wanted to share it when we got home.

It's not to say we weren't taught manners.  My Mum (who actually loves to eat with her fingers!) made us eat properly with knife in right-hand and fork in left.  We even had to formally ask for permission if we wish to be excused from the table when we were finished our meal.  And we certainly were NOT allowed to talk with our mouths full.  But still, supper was not a quiet time, it was a loud, noisy interlude in our day when we all felt free to talk as much as we wanted and for the most part, had our parents' full attention.

With one exception.  In the summertime, when the CBC Crop Report came on the radio, we immediately had to quieten.  My father only had to put up one finger and say "Quiet!" in a stern voice, and instant hush fell into the room.  We would listen quietly as the crop report was given and then invariably my Dad would give some commentary on that day's crop report.  Then all would return to normal and we'd be busy yakking away as usual.

Anyway, consider this a hushed moment in the middle of your noisy weekend, because I'm about to give our very own Crop Report.


First the BAD news:

Some evil monster has snipped off THREE of our pepper plants and left them to die a miserable death, shriveled in the sun, separated at the base of the plant from the roots that would give it life!  I suspect it is one of those @#!% blackbirds that have been pooping with wild abandon in our swimming pool.  @#!% blackbirds!!!

Next, somebunny has been nibbling off all the tops of our beet greens!

Wretched cute furry little things!  I'm feeling surprisingly in tune with my inner Mr. McGregor and Elmer Fudd! @#?% rabbits!

And finally on the Bad News front:

Our five peach trees have been hit very hard with curly leaf this year.  Here's a close-up picture that will show you how they are affected:

You can see the dead leaves in amongst the healthy second set.  The good news is that they seem to be making a good come-back with a healthy second set of leaves and fruit.  We will baby the trees along this summer as this type of disease makes them particularly vulnerable to winter kill.  My husband and I are debating whether or not we should get rid of all the fruit right now so that the trees don't have to spend their energy on producing fruit.  We can always get peaches from my brother who grows acres and acres of them.  But, of course, it is a difficult decision to make because we really do love having our own peaches.

Now on to the Good News section of today's crop report.

Our white cherries are ripe and absolutely delicious!  This tree in particular is absolutely loaded with fruit.

I am particularly fond of white cherries as they are so tangy!  Here's a close-up.

And some of our black cherry varieties look they will be ready to pick by the end of this week or early next.  I just hope we don't get a big rain storm late this week that will split all those lovely cherries like popcorn!

The rain we've had up until now has been very welcome.  Look at how the pears have sized up already!  The rain has been very good for them.  These Bartletts are already about 3 inches in length.

Looks like we'll have a good plum crop this year too. Our shiro plums are doing well, although we did lose a number of trees this winter. Not sure why really, since the shiros at my parents' farm would grow forever into huge gnarly old trees, but for some reason on our farm they don't have the same long life. Maybe it's the difference between our sandy loam and my parents' heavy clay soil. But the trees that remain are healthy and strong and have produced a lovely crop so far.  Hope we don't get hail or anything between now and the time they ripen.  They are another crop, like cherries, that can split if there is a huge rainfall when they are close to being picked.

Our early golden plums are looking wonderful:

As are our stanley prunes, especially since these trees are only 3 years old.  They are producing magnificently for such young trees.

I had a discussion with my brother and sister-in-law (who are full-time farmers) and we decided not to thin our apricots even though there is a heavy crop.  There are just so many things that can go wrong with apricots, causing some of them to be unmarketable.  Also, if we thin them, they will get quite huge and not too many people want really huge apricots.  So we've left them alone for now, but as you can see, there are clusters of them growing this year.  Apricots are funny trees in that they usually have two or three years of a light crop to every year of a heavy crop.  Looks like this year is the heavy crop year!

And on the garden front, everything (including the weeds) are growing like weeds!  Well, with the exception of the aforementioned pepper plants and beet greens.  The red currants are almost ready to pick.

And our little mystery plant (see this past blog post for more details), is really taking off.  I still don't know what it is.  Any guesses?

Well, that's it for the Crop Report today.  You can all go back to chattering up a storm around the Sunday Dinner table.  Hope you are having a good conversation with your loved ones, listening to the things that are on their hearts, and having time to share those that are on yours!