Six Words: Orchard, Case, Transport, Party, Wrong, Torture
When we moved to Richardson, Texas from up north, I wanted to plant a grapefruit tree. Both in Chicago and in Connecticut, stores would advertise ruby red grapefruit from Texas. The landscaper that we used at our new house told me that I couldn’t grow grapefruit in the Dallas area. When I protested about all of the Texas grapefruit that we had eaten, he told me I was wrong, that they would only grow further south. About 800 miles further south. So I looked for alternative fruit trees that would grow in the Dallas area.
I didn’t want to plant an orchard. One tree would do. That led to my next lesson. Many fruit trees need to be in an orchard, or at least near others of their kind, to produce fruit. Apple trees need prolonged cold to produce fruit, so an apple tree was out. Pears would grow in the Dallas area and one kind of pear that would grow there and self-pollinate were Keiffer pears. And so I became the proud cultivator of a pear tree.
Keiffer pears get large. Very large. And one tree can produce a LOT of pears. When the tree was covered with pears, I’d test to see when they were ready for harvesting. We didn’t put them in cases. I had two bushel baskets and we’d fill them – multiple times. That is way more pears than we eat. People would suggest making pear butter and pear jam, but that would be work and we didn’t like those things anyway. My wife did find a recipe for pear tarts and they are one of the best foods in the world, but how much of even the best food in the world can you eat in a short period of time? Even if you have a party, there is a limit to how many tarts you can serve.
So we’d donate pears to the local food banks. One of the food banks would weigh the pears so they could write the weight on a receipt. One time, when my wife transported pears, only perfect pears, no bruised ones, she donated over 200 pounds of pears! The pears tended to weigh a pound or more each!
There was one more challenge to having such a prolific tree. The squirrels loved the pears. They could nibble on them on the tree, and leave partially eaten pears on the tree which would eventually fall to the ground. And pears would fall to the ground on their own, if they were too ripe or if birds or insects had damaged them. Occasionally there were even good pears on the ground. Pears on the ground are not pretty. They are rather disgusting looking, and as they age and turn brown and mushy they get even more disgusting looking. The ground where my tree was planted sloped down toward an alley, so many pears rolled into the alley to rot or be eaten by critters or run over by cars. The neighborly thing to do was to pick all of them up before they became too unsightly. Do you know what it’s like to pick 20 or 30 or 50 or 100 bruised pears up off the ground. It is torture!