Hindsight, Fruit, and Little Thieves

We are lucky to live in one of the most fertile valleys on earth, the Santa Clara Valley of Northern California. Once one of the world’s foremost fruit-producing areas, it is now more widely known as Silicon Valley, and over the past fifty years it has been gradually covered in concrete and suburban sprawl. But the soil that remains is good, and the climate is nearly perfect.

What that means for us as suburban homeowners is that our yards, front and back, are capable of growing things. Like most homeowners in the valley we have a few fruit trees — in our case orange, lemon, pear, persimmon, loquat and pomegranate. They grow and produce happily in our semi-Mediterranean climate without a lot of intervention from me, which is fortunate, as I am not much of a gardener.

Every so often, one of the trees reaches a magical combination of season and temperature known only to itself that indicates to it that its fruit is ripe. The exact combination for each species of fruit tree on our property remains a mystery to me. The calendar is only the roughest of guides. As soon as I tell myself, “Oh, the pears always ripen in the second week of August,” we have a year where they come ripe in the third week of July. So I can’t get too confident.

But the squirrels and birds that visit our yard are confident. They always know when the fruit is ripe. Maybe they have super-attuned senses that allow them to smell or see a difference I can’t discern. Or maybe they are just more willing to keep tasting unripe fruit. Evidence shows that it’s clearly no skin off their backs if all the fruit on the tree has a few nibbles out of it.

I mostly perceive the fruit’s ripeness in hindsight. By the time I notice two-thirds of the ripening loquats have been eaten, I realize I should have harvested them yesterday. On the morning I am awakened by the crack of an overburdened persimmon branch crashing to the ground, I realize I should have culled the fruit already. When the pomegranates split open on the branch, I understand that they have given up on me.

Every year I berate myself for allowing fruit to go to waste. I tell myself I should be paying more attention; I should make more of an effort to get to that fruit and make sure it gets eaten (by humans).

This year, we have been at home full-time since March. We have taken no business trips, no vacations, we haven’t had any extra-busy weeks of running around to distract my attention away from the changes taking place in the garden. Surely, this year we should be on top of the fruit situation.

And yet I spent much of May telling myself that the loquats weren’t quite sweet enough, right up until the day there were no more to be had. The squirrels ate them, sweet or not.

For the past two weeks, we have been picking pears every other day. I’ve cooked with them, given away bags full to friends and neighbors, sent some to a local food distribution center, and still, the yard is littered with the ones that fell before we could get to them. Many of those have one bite out of them. Thanks, squirrels.

I wonder, how do other people keep up with these things? Perhaps a single family was never intended to have such bounty, or to keep it for themselves. Surely one pear tree is enough to serve the pear needs of an entire neighborhood. Maybe we need to form a neighborhood co-op, where we all pick one neighbor’s apricots and the other neighbor’s lemons, and everyone comes and gets all the persimmons they want and I won’t have to spend October climbing all over our persimmon tree. Or September. Or whenever the persimmon tree decides to shower us with persimmons this year.

Either that, or I need to recruit the squirrels.