Fruit from Your Childhood

[digitS']

I'm just getting around to having Bartlett pears. Peeling, coring and smelling that ripe pear, it seemed so natural and involved so much, I will say, subconscious.

I grew up in Oregon's Rogue Valley as did my mother, thirty years before. There were a few plum and apple orchards, plenty of peaches, and Barlett pears. It must have been Mom. I liked peaches but she claimed that the fuzzy skin made her shiver ... We had a nice Newtown Pippin apple tree on the farm, several Carpathian walnuts but no other fruit trees.

During the winters these days, I probably average that apple a day. DW buys bananas almost every trip to the grocery store, 12 months a year!! But, Bartlett pears make me feel at home ...

How about for you? Is there a seasonal fruit that brings you home with its fragrance and flavor? Just peeling it ...

Steve

 

[Nyboy]

I know what you mean, for me cherries and mulberries. Growing up had 2 cherry trees and 1 mulberry tree. I cam remember sitting in cherry trees eating cherries for hours. Nothing was prettier then when they where in flower. I must have killed at least 15 cherry trees trying to bring back that menory. My clay soil just holds to much water for them to live. We had a mulberry tree that I used to eat the berries when ripe. Tree was planted in a very bad spot, right next to patio, because of the mess it made was cut down. We had 3 apple trees in yard but no one ate those ( never sprayed so wormy).

 

[Ridgerunner]

Cracking black walnuts or hickory nuts, picking apples off the ground usually or sometimes picking them from the tree and eating around the worms and bad spots, picking blackberries, dewberries or occasionally raspberries or blueberries. Wild strawberries growing in the side of the road as we were walking home from the school bus in May. Picking and eating a small watermelon when we were taking a break from putting up the tobacco crop. That grape vine down in the pasture climbing a stunted apple tree. Lots of memories around fruits, nuts, or even melons.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Don't have a lot of childhood fruit memories. Being suburban we didn't really HAVE any fruit we didn't ourselves plant (except the wineberries) And not a lot of that. But to my memory the following stand out

1. Once upstate, we went peach picking. After a little while I got a bit bored ( it was still pretty young and short, so most of the peaches were out of my reach) So I wandered off carrying a punnet (just in case) and wound up on the edge of the orchard, where things had gone wild. To my surprise sitting in the scrub were some canes bearing very decent sized blackberries (note: I'm going to use "blackberry" in all these remembered cases, as I didn't know the difference. Some may have been blackberries some dewberries and some black raspberries) I wound up filling a whole punnet with them. Not only did we get some free extra fruit (the weigh people said they hadn't planted the blackberries so they really couldn't charge for them) but it turned out my family liked THEM a whole lot more than the peaches (it wasn't a particularly good peach year)

2. One while wandering in the scrub behind our house I wandered into the scrub behind the house next door. On top of one of the rocks there was a bramble running, again having a (ONE) very nice sized blackberry (in retrospect this one probably WAS a dewberry, since it was trailing) This was an exciting find since I though we had no wild blackberries around us (at that time there was a pretty substantial bank of blackberry canes in a sort of dip between our next door house and the one next to that, but the berries were useless; tiny, sour and all seeds. It got taken down when the built the new house between the two)

3. Around when I was ten, I used to sometimes during the summer walk down the mile or so to the train station and meet my mom as she came home from work. On one side of the road at one point of this, there is a deep gully (really deep, our car actually fell into it once on an icy day, and none of it was still above the level of the road) that led up into the back of a woody area (that, if you walked all the way through it , apparently comes out on the other side of the soccer field on the highway. When I would walk it, I would often skirt the edge of this gully since the fauna there had some interesting stuff (like witch hazels and toad lilies) One day I was astonished to find and apple tree there, laden with fruit. That there was a feral apple wasn't astonishing (lots of people around had have big apples in their yards) it was that the fruit was completely undamaged and the tree straight (most of the apples around here are wormy cankered messes by the time they are sort of ripe, and the trees twisted and cankered (or why there are so few still around, eventually most of them got too twisted to be stable and were taken down to protect the houses) Alas my parents would not let me try any of them (their reasoning was that a wild apple that had no bug damage was probably poisonous. ) But they sure looked good. Really would like to find that tree again since a pest resistant apple would be a valuable thing, and I have to assume the tree was wild

 

[Pulsegleaner]

(Or maybe it wasn't Recently, my dad saw a survey of the area done by the village, and it turns out there actually ARE the remains of an old apple orchard somewhere in that woody zone.) I also have vague memories of there being some sort of small shrub a little further on I took for an elderberry (though the berries seemed a lot bigger than those on an elder should be)

4. At the back of the neighbors across the street (the one on the other side of the new house) There is a chain link fence; that separates their yard from the scrub on the other side, that belongs to the hospital. For a while right on the other side of that fence was a red currant bush. Inaccessible from their side, but if you went into the woods a bit, there was a place where a tree had fallen and crashed through the fence, so you could hop over. Only think I did it once (no one in my house really likes currants, so there seemed to point) This one I think I actually know where it came from. There is a MASSIVE bank of red currants at the restoration about a mile or two away, and I'm fairly sure that a bird ate some fruit there, flew a bit, then pooped. The two seemed to be the same kind.

 

[thistlebloom]

The fragrance of apples always transports me to my great grandmas little log house. She had a big apple tree in the backyard and kept the fruit in her basement . The smell of apples always drifted up the stairs and filled her house. I don't think I actually ever tasted one of those apples though....

In elementary school my best friend Cathy D. had tons of citrus trees
below her house. There were Navals and Valencias and tangelos and tangerines and grapefruit and kumquats and Minneolas. We would take a break from playing wild mustangs and gorge ourselves on sweet tree ripe citrus. I've never found oranges to compare with the ones we stuffed ourselves with back then.

 

[journey11]

Probably shouldn't tell this one, but now I have to... Mine is not a fruit. It would have to be chestnuts. Who else here has childhood memories of stepping on chestnut burrs while barefooted? ((...Raise your hand. LOL.)) My senior neighbor next door had 3 large chestnut trees on her hillside and one small one that we used to climb all the time. We'd gather the nuts up by the bucketful and eat a few (probably worms and all, since now I think they all inevitably have worms in them.) But one time I was out playing with my little friend who lived in the house in front of ours and her big sis and two of her school friends came by and were picking on us. One of those bigger girls hit me on the head with a dirty mop. So I picked up a chestnut burr and chucked it right at her face. I may have won that battle, but not the war. Hahaha. The girls went off sobbing and whining and my friend's mother chewed me out pretty good.

My MIL tells me they are very good roasted, but I have never had the chance to try them.

 

[Nyboy]

Journey you are missing out if you never had roasted chestnuts. It willn't be Thanksgiving or Christmas without them. In NY there are carts that sell just roasted chestnut at holiday time.

 

[ninnymary]

Nope, never smelled a horse and never had roasted chestnuts.

Mary

 

[Jared77]

For me it's rhubarb. I grew up in a suburb (houses were built in the early 50's) in a house that my grandparents bought & sold to my folks and I grew up in.

My grandparents had planted rhubarb in the backyard and Dad kept it going. Every spring we would cut a bunch of it and take it over to my grandparents house on Saturday afternoon. Grandma would make it into pie for Sunday dinners. No strawberries just rhubarb pie.

To this day I love rhubarb pie and whenever I have that sweet tart treat I think of my grandparents.