fruit explosion!

As I catalogued earlier, we have a ton of fruit trees. Figgy has been going gangbusters, so I made a nice quickbread with whole figs in it, which got split between Anna's grandmother and Arlene, the nice old lady who lives behind us. Delivering the bread to her was, of course, a half hour of sitting down and chatting, but she's fun to talk to.

Then we had too many figs, so I made whole wheat muffins, replacing the water/milk with fig puree, and additional sweetening with maple syrup (one of the delights of our white figs is that they're not super sweet). They came out fabulous, getting stickier and more filling every day. I may seek a lighter recipe.

Figgy now seems to be on hiatus, and our peach tree in front finally self-destructed, its primary branch breaking off under the weight of dozens and dozens of rock-hard peaches. Four inches at the base, I had to cut it into four pieces before I could even move it out of the car-space in the driveway.

(By the way, if you ever do any tree-trimming, I cannot recommend highly enough the Fiskars Power Tooth® Softgrip® Saw (13"). I have never in my life seen a saw this efficient. (I once cut down a 5-inch thick tree with a small hunting knife. I know about efficiency. It's super comfortable to use and you'll just throw your straight-bladed tree-trimmer away.)

We collected all the peaches, and now I guess we'll try to ripen them? In paper bags, apparently. Or use them to break car windows. But really, we ripen them, and then what? We've got a hundred peaches. We'll figure it out.

The peach tree hasn't really been happy anyway, so we'd planned to replace it when tree-planting time comes around. Perhaps with a lemon tree that actually produces lemons instead of 2-inch thorns? Possibilities abound!

Finally, our scrappy little apple tree is getting into the act! The apples we know come from so much grafting and cultivating that we can't actually tell if the apples are ripe. We have yet to try the obvious thing of picking one and trying to eat it. While I can't speak for Anna, I know I've been resistant because there just aren't that many apples, and what if I pick one and it isn't ripe? I'll have wasted an apple! Such are the quandaries of urban farming.

Mmm, perhaps I will go have a fig muffin, and not have to eat for another 12 hours.