The Miracle File

I have been so busy with family matters in the last month or so I have not follow though on the fall duties of my garden beds.  I did manage to build a couple frames and cover two raised beds for the wintering over of kale and some other greens but that was about it until last week-end.

Fruit growers believe in raking up all fruit tree leaves because they can host non desirable bugs and diseases over the winter.  I used the sunny day last Saturday to organize this project.  The high winds finally had made the branches bare.  The fifth trip though the back gate of the yard to dump leaves I saw something out of the corner of my eye.  I stopped in total disbelief -it was a persimmon!

I planted this tree six years ago because of the fond memories of a winter spent in Palo Alto and a tree that I grew to love while walking by each day pushing a baby buggy about ten years ago.   The corner house was originally a farmhouse and the tree was probably over fifty years old.  The house remained along with the tree but the land had became a neighborhood of tiny bungalows one of which I lived in for that winter.  The tree had so much fruit that some of it dropped on the sidewalk and, of course, coming from a long line of hunter-gatherers, I immediately would pick up all the persimmons on my pathway.  As a woman from the Midwest, I had not enjoyed persimmons often in my life but I found a real taste for them.

That first spring of buying trees for the new house in Olympia I let a man talk me into buy a Meader persimmon tree.  I viewed it as a long shot of ever producing fruit for me but it was the moment of romantic taste buds, I planted my tree.  Over the years with so much disappointment connected with my  non-producing peach trees, I passed my persimmons tree and sort of smiled at the silliness of planting it.  I also realize where I planted the tree it would not shade my gardens so it could stay and by the time it grow two stories tall I would not be gardening this plot of ground.

That one sweet persimmons was sweet, perfectly shaped and consumed in total by me.  Many things each years in gardening are disappointing but this year my gardening was a success.  2010 was a real successful year.