Why I Planted Peaches and Pears (Last Installment in This Series)

When I moved from the city, my new home had half a dozen old apple trees near the silo beside the barn. They were of the winesap cultivar. Neglected for many years, they were in sad shape. I followed instructions in The Reader’s Digest Illustrated Guide to Gardening to prune them. They held on for a few more years, but the yield was usually disappointing. I finally gave up. The wood lent fragrance to many a winter’s day when I burned it in my Buck stove. I replaced the trees with plums, apples, peaches, and pears. This is a story about the last two.

I remembered how thoroughly my mother enjoyed the fresh fruit from her trees. How easily I can picture her as she sat watching Ruth Lyons on the Zenith black-and-white TV while eating a peach, which dripped down her chin. How readily I can see her later in the year as she plucked a pear and bit into its inner pale yellow goodness. Nothing made her happier! She was certainly no J. Alfred Prufrock, who asks, “Do I dare to eat a peach?” Like my mother, I was determined to grow peaches and pears, not just apples.

My Peaches That Snapped Their Branches

 

In my area, frosts nip the fruit blooms almost every year. With the loss of the spring flowers comes a fruitless harvest. Two years ago, the peach tree blossoms escaped the usual frost. The fruit set on so thickly and heavily that the branches began to split off the trunks of the trees. I tried to prevent calamity by propping the branches with two-by-fours, but the limbs broke at the points of support. I had the greatest crop of peaches ever! … but the cost was dear. My peach trees are so weakened that I plan to replace them with new stock.

Last year, the blooming of the pear trees slipped in between the killing frosts. The fruit set on in bunches like overgrown grapes. The branches arched downward, many of them touching the ground, and I was afraid that my pear trees would be destroyed in the same way that my peach trees were ruined in the previous year. My pears were younger, which caused their branches to be springier. Luckily, none of the limbs snapped! They were covered with fruit of that indescribable outward color (green or yellow or brown, depending on the angle and the light). For weeks, I enjoyed the purity of pears. To me, the flavor of pears is uncomplicated but powerful in its simplicity. When you make your own apple sauce, include one or two pears. You will be amazed how the notes of the pear enhance the taste of the apples!

My Heavenly Pears in Jars

No wonder pears have figured so prominently in literature and the other arts! They are divine!

     

Why I Plant Raspberries

One of my favorite memories of growing up was when my mother went berrying in the summer. My brother and I piled into the car, and our mother drove to a deserted farm that had become overgrown with blackberry vines. Except for being startled by an occasional snake, we spent a dreamy morning peacefully filling our buckets with plump berries—and eating more than we dropped in our buckets! I say “dreamy” because there is no way to race through a patch of berries. Thorns cover the canes, and the picker of berries must be as graceful as the canes themselves and proceed with slow, thoughtful movements, if scratches are to be avoided.

Now I grow red raspberries, and they are among the easiest plants to establish. My raspberries have been taking over large sections of my yard for several years now, and I don’t mind a bit! They supply me with seemingly endless streams of berries in those wonderful hot months that bring out the fullest flavor of raspberries. I am reminded of Walt Whitman, the great American poet whose work was the focus of my dissertation, and whose life and poetry were the subject of one of my courses that I taught for many exuberant years; In Specimen Days for June 21 in 1882, Whitman wrote about his “favorite dish, currants and raspberries, mixed, sugar’d, fresh and ripe from the bushes—I pick ‘em myself.” The canes form artistic arches. Where they touch the soil, they form roots. The part with the roots can be cut from the rest of the cane and given a shallow planting, thereby expanding the berry patch with minimal effort.

A Few Jars of My Raspberry Jam

 

Berries form on two-year-old canes. After harvesting the berries, I cut away the canes that held them. I am careful to leave the springy, new canes that have not yet borne fruit; those canes will give me the next year’s crop. Hsün Tzu (whose name is often given as Xunzi) was born around 313 or 310 BC and died between 238 and 220 BC; philosophers often include his work with that of Confucius and Mencius in the development of Confucian thought. Hsün Tzu wrote about a raspberry vine standing upright without needing to be staked; his metaphor represented Confucius who, at age 70, had perfectly blended his inborn nature and his philosophical training. I hope, when I am that age, my thinking and my nature will likewise be indistinguishable from one another; for the time being, I can opine that the selection of a raspberry vine to represent a well-respected philosopher is most fortunate! The supple cane—grounded yet free, arching delicately, and bringing health and happiness—is joyously symbolic of wisdom.  

Dried red raspberry leaves can be steeped in boiling water for fifteen minutes to form a “tea” that can be effective as an eye wash. I am told that such use of an infusion of dried raspberry leaves was practiced among some groups of Native Americans. The astringent quality of the tannin in the leaves helps to heal styes. Many websites describe the benefits of raspberry leaves for pregnant women.

Morning is the best time to harvest raspberries, provided that they are not wet. In the hours before the sun beats down on them, they offer their richest taste.

Why I Planted Squash

In a recent year, the seeds I planted in several adjacent rows in my vegetable garden failed to germinate. Faced with a blank space, I wished to fill it. Always be careful what you wish for! I bought summer squash seeds and formed half a dozen hills of two or three seeds each. All of them grew. And grew. And grew. When I began harvesting squash, I had delusions of keeping up. I collected a few and relished their rich flavor. But soon, I had too many! I was fetching them by the bushel basket nearly every day. I could not begin to give them away! The plants commandeered half of the garden. Each morning, when I went to the garden to pick the squash, I could not find spaces for my feet. From some crazy desire not to crush the thick leaf stems of my gigantic squash plants, I proceeded slowly on tiptoe, almost losing my balance and teetering above the squash jungle. To have fallen among the foliage in such a way as to have wiped out a few of the plants and to have slowed the production of squash would have been a blessing, but I never fell.

Squash Taking Over My Garden

Finally, I was forced to admit to myself that I had too many squash, and I began chucking their swollen bodies over the ravine into my creek. Poet and novelist Marge Piercy perfectly captured the same experience in her poem entitled “Attack of the Squash People,” which I first heard her read in 1980:

https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/html/1807/4350/poem1606.html

Piercy’s poem is hysterical in the fullest sense of the adjective. I know. So was I.

One of Several Baskets of Squash That I Harvested Every Morning

Harvesting Squash by the Wagonload

A digression is in order. I first met Piercy when I was earning my master’s degree in poetry writing at Indiana University. She addressed the workshop of ten poets in which I was enrolled. Our professor had mailed an anonymous sampling of our poems to Piercy in advance of her visit. After she was introduced, Piercy said, “I want to discuss one of your poems. It is ‘Wrestling.’ Who wrote it?” I raised my hand. Piercy complimented my work. Several years later, after I had finished my PhD and was teaching at Northern Kentucky University, Piercy came for a reading. At a social event, I asked her if she remembered my poem. She said she did. I had the joy of meeting Piercy on at least two additional occasions. One was at the home of a creative writing professor. Music was playing. Piercy was sitting beside the professor. I had walked over to Piercy to ask a question about poetry, but she brushed off my introductory remarks, stood, and commanded, “Dance with me!” Embarrassed as all get out, I danced. In a matter of seconds, everyone was dancing. I undoubtedly got more from dancing with Piercy for a few minutes than I would have received by asking my question; after all, she gave me something fun to mention in this blog!

My favorite way to prepare summer squash is basic. I slice it, boil it briefly, and put butter and salt on it. Yum! It’s almost as good as dancing with Marge Piercy!

Why I Plant Onions

The trick to growing onions is preserving them as long as possible after harvesting them. First, as the stalks of the onions begin turning yellow, you can leave the bulbs in the ground to be fattened for another week or, at most, two weeks. After that length of time, the onions may start to decay. Mine always pull out easily.

My Onions Dried and Hanging from a Nail in My Solarium

I stack them, stalks and all, on wire racks on a porch that gets plenty of sunshine in the morning and ample breezes throughout the day. I try not to let them touch each other on the racks. Depending on weather conditions, the onions need several weeks to dry. When the stalks are completely dry, I bunch the onions in clusters of five up to eight and tie clothesline cord or twine around the stalks. Next, I hang them in bunches over nails in my solarium. Whenever I want an onion for a recipe, I snip off a fresh onion from a bunch. By hanging them, I can keep the onions almost indefinitely. I have to be watchful because, occasionally, one will begin to rot—particularly if the drying period has been unusually humid.

The onions look homey hanging from nails all around my solarium. They remind me of my Quaker ancestors who, in the pioneer days long ago, put in good stores of vegetables and fruit to last throughout the long winter months. Although I am not necessarily a student of John Greenleaf Whittier, the Quaker poet, I admire his poem entitled “Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyll”: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174758. If you have not read it, you are in for a treat! Composed and published just after the end of the American Civil War, the poem commemorated life on a New England farm prior to the full flowering of the Industrial Revolution. The poem has been described as nostalgic, and I can see why; but I think that “Snow-Bound” was written in an era when, for many readers, the experience of an uncluttered home life around a blazing hearth in winter was ongoing or, at least, still fresh. For me, the poem is more nearly a clear snapshot than a rosy memory distorted by the passing of time. Each day that I notice my clusters of golden onions, I think happy thoughts of my upbringing on a farm. The onions evoke the joys of gathering in my mother’s warm kitchen on a December morning.

My First Edition of John Greenleaf Whittier’s Book Entitled

The Panorama, and Other Poems, Published by the Famous

Boston Firm of Ticknor and Fields in 1856 and a Look Inside

 

Onions provided a strange chapter in my life as a writer. My first published creative writing was a prose poem entitled “The Book of the Dead,” which appeared in Artful Dodge when the journal was brand-spanking new and originated from the creative mind of its founder, Daniel Bourne, in Bloomington, Indiana (before its move to Wooster, Ohio): http://artfuldodge.sites.wooster.edu/. Just before I left Indiana University with a newly minted PhD in hand, I submitted a second prose poem to Daniel. It was entitled “Onion Liturgy.” For reasons that now escape both Daniel and me, it was never published, but both of us remembered that it was. Odd! Several months ago, I asked Daniel for a copy of the issue that had carried it, and Daniel found that the poem had escaped being printed. No wonder I could not find the issue in my library! I could have sworn that it was published, but it never was! I have lost the poem, which is probably just as well because it likely suffered from being a spin-off of “The Book of the Dead,” which, for its numerous faults, had a certain idiosyncratic charm. As I recall, my concept for “Onion Liturgy” was that philosophy is like an onion that can be peeled, layer by identical layer, until there is nothing left except the memory of replication. Profound? Hardly, but I was young.

My First Published Creative Writing in Artful Dodge in 1980

That Was Supposed to Be Followed by a Sequel Entitled “Onion Liturgy”

So when I notice my onions hanging from nails, I feel—with satisfaction and relief—that I have come a long way as a writer since the days when I was first trying my tentative hand at composing poems.