Poctober
(Garden • Food)
In our warm and perverse autumn, Nature only allows the harvesting of garden foods whose names begin with the letter “P.”
Everything else I was trying to grow was pretty much blown off the face of the planet, if not the garage roof, during a rain storm with accompanying 50-mile-per-hour wind gusts, which I apparently brought on myself by staying home computer coding instead of heading off to church, where reports indicate much less rain and fewer blowing bursts greeted the Faithful.
So what we’re left with is peppers (Anaheim, Mirasol and the late but wow! Jamaican Hot Chocolate), pomegranate (Garnet Sash, but that’s a laugher of a name for a variety that bears white interior fruit), Hachiya persimmons (what God orders for breakfast, you could look it up) and, even in a drought year, many hundred pounds of tiny but intensely flavorful native pecans.
To those who grow them (on purpose or indavertently, like us) enthusiasm for pecans is tempered by the memory of stooping and scooping, bending and lifting, squatting and standing. We’ve succumbed to the lure of old-timey Amish-looking pecan conveniences – springy metal devices that roll over nuts and grab a few on the trip past, or that employ other mechanical means in a mostly futile attempt to coax pecans into a bucket without muscle strain. Mostly futile. My 5-year-old can out-pick even an athletically toned opponent forced to use one of those pecan-picking contraptions.
Those who maintain big pecan orchards plant tree varieties that they endeavor to keep pretty short. They employ mighty machines that literally shake the nuts right off the trees, and other machines that rake and sweep them off of the ground. My 5-year-old cannot out-pick those combustion engine-driven opponents. But on the other hand, our trees have trunks five feet in diameter, and stand 70 feet tall. So only an irritated God looking for Sunday backsliders is going to shake any of these trees.
He did just that yesterday, and we discovered the pecan harvest season has just begun. It took my youngest son about six minutes to become totally sick of picking up nuts.
The queen of our fall harvest is the persimmon. Hachiyas are packed with vitamins and trace elements your body needs. They also are a fruit mystery to most people around here, even though the trees are perfectly adapted to the semi-South Texas climate. That’s because they never show up in grocery stores, and rarely in farmer’s markets. They’re delicate when perfectly ripe, and trying to ship them any farther than the kitchen counter would be like trying to ship a load of water balloons.
Mary, my 88-year-old neighbor whose family lived in our house decades ago, planted our Hachiya tree in the dappled shade of a big pecan. Even with only partial sunlight, the tree is producing so many apple-sized fruits 40 years later that I had to prop a thick board under one of the longer branches a month ago in order to keep some of that fruit off of the ground.
Mary loves persimmons, but the trick lies in finding a way to get a bag of them onto her porch before she sees you. Otherwise, she fusses and insists and refuses to dismiss you until you take a crumpled up $5 bill. “I’ll just feel real badly if you don’t take it,” she argues. Yet she planted the tree, and all you do is reach up and help yourself to delicious.
→ B.Dunn, Oct 05, 2009, 05 40 am
