Learning to Share

We used to have two wimpy little apricot trees along the side of our house. Then, last year, one of them croaked unexpectedly. Everything above about 3 feet off the ground just died. Bummer. The surviving tree looks to be in peril as well, with a big, expanding black crack a couple feet up the trunk. But it flowered and produced plenty of fruit this year.

I tried to wait until it was ripe to pick, but I noticed lots and lots of half-eaten apricots on the ground and decided to pick as many as I could reach before there were none left.I probably picked about three dozen. But they weren't ripe. I had to put them in paper bags on the counter to ripen. It worked well and now they're delicious! But...there were lots of apricots I couldn't reach. I wasn't even sure how the squirrels could reach them. I thought maybe I'd get out the big clippers and just cut off whole branches to get to them.

But, I hesitated. And these guys didn't. I accept that I need to share with the wildlife, such as it is. But really, couldn't they share a little more with us?

Jammin'

Am I Martha Stewart or what? We finally managed to pick most of the apricots off of one of our apricot trees over the weekend. Last year, our harvest consisted of one apricot, which I duly cut into quarters so that each of us could appreciate a tiny little piece of it. As you can see, this year's harvest turned out...uh...differently.



In fact, we are now drowning in hundreds of ripe and semi-ripe apricots. There are still a number on the tree. And there's a whole tree we didn't touch because none of its apricots were ripe yet. Fortunately, there aren't that many on the second one! What does one do with this much fruit? Well, it's tasty, so we've eaten quite a lot of it, but see this picture of the pile of apricots in the basket? I think that represents about a tenth of all the apricots we picked. We've got *bags* of them.

Well, what would Martha do? Well, she'd make jam, of course! After realizing I didn't have a clue how to make jam...I didn't even know where to get jars...I took a trip to our friendly neighborhood OSH. After all, a store named "Orchard Supply" ought to have this kind of thing, right? Right. Two days and a lot of boiling water later, I've got jars and jars of the most delicious apricot jam ever. I'm giving it away (if you read this, you're local and you want some, drop on by!), but you know, I ate toast for lunch today, just so I could eat some jam and I think I might just drink the stuff. Yummmmeeeeee!!!

Oh, and the only thing I have to say about the kids in this post is that they love apricots, but Mam won't touch the jam and it looks like after downing one piece of apricot jam toast, Smunch has decided to stick with strawberry as well. Seriously. Whose kids are these??