Summer Bounty!
Kuzzin Kris arrived yesterday, laden (as usual) with items for the larder. Or in this case, for the fridge and the fruit bowl! She brought peaches and nectarines, not quite ripe, that went into a bowl on the counter. The juicy, ready-to-eat apricots and fat black plums got their own container and snuggled up perfectly to a waiting watermelon on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. Gorgeous and tempting! But not for long…
As soon as we returned from a full day of cheering for cowboys and cowgirls and singer songwriters, we dove right in to those apricots and plums. We were still overly warm from all day in the rodeo sun followed by an evening in the jam-packed Peninsula Arts Center, and that cool, dripping-down-your-chin fruit was perfect bedtime snack. There just isn’t anything like summer fruit!
Ready, Set, Eat!
Even now in the twenty-first century, when we can get just about any food item at any time of year, locally-grown-in-season fruit is a special treat. And, by ‘locally grown’ I think I mean from the countryside within a day’s round trip of driving. When I was a kid and the roads were iffy and just getting to Astoria was a Big Deal, we didn’t often see exotic items such as peaches and nectarines, even in summer. In Oysterville, our fruit crops tended toward blackberries and pears and apples. And except for the blackberries, they mainly ‘came on’ in the fall. The most unusual fruit tree I remember was the Italian plum tree at the Red House and I think that was planted well after I was an adult.
William’s Pride
However, we might have a crop of mid-summer fruit of our own, this year. Our William’s Pride apples look to be almost ready for picking and, here it is, not even the end of July! We chose that variety of dwarf apple tree both for its name (after my father) and because the fruit is ready for picking earlier than most other apples. “Earlier” usually means mid-August, however. Like all our other garden bounty, the apples are way ahead of themselves. What a delicious summer!
The first Celtic harvest festival, Lughnasadh, is less than a week away (remember that the Ancient Celts considered the Summer Solstice to be MidSummer, not the beginning) and it’s such a lovely time to be eating things we’ve grown ourselves or have been grown by local farmers. We feel the connection to the Earth and a gratefulness to it for sustaining our lives. Even if we only forage some blackberries from a vacant lot, it makes us a part of the great wheel that is turning from Summer to Autumn. Besides, eating seasonally is more healthful than eating out-of-season foods just because they are to be had.