Fresh Apricots

Listen to this article: FreshApricots.mp3

I arrived at my friend Julie’s house last Saturday morning at 8h45. We’d planned on walking to downtown for breakfast and meeting her friend at the Farmer’s Market. The first thing she said when I walked through her front door was: You have to turn around and go back out. She laughed at my confused look and repeated: Turn around, go back out on the porch, and pick an apricot.

I turned around and walked back out onto her front porch. Sure enough, she has a huge apricot tree in her front yard that is just bursting with fruit. I searched the foliage for an accessible apricot, reached up to lower a branch, and just plucked one.

That’s it. I just reached up and picked an apricot from her apricot tree. That’s one of the best things about living in California I think. Fresh food. Fresh fruit. Fresh vegetables. I grew up in Northern Canada but I’ve been living here since 2001. It is such a novelty to realize that fruit actually grows on trees (and not in the displays and bins of the supermarket). It’s even more of a novelty to reach up and pick a fruit from the tree and just eat it right there and then.

Which is exactly what I did. She said to pry the apricot in half. The flesh was just tender enough all I had to do was to hold the fruit in both hands and use my thumbs to open it up. I picked out the pit and bit into one half.

I offered the other half to Julie, but she said she’d already had some for breakfast. I asked her how did she get her tree to produce so much fruit. She said the guy who worked on her trees asked her: Do you want it to look pretty? Or do you want it to produce fruit?

She said she wanted it to produce fruit.

I think the fruit looks just gorgeous. And it tasted unbelievable.

PS: Check the comments. We eventually found out the guy who works on her tree is Mike Mahoney of Healdsburg Tree Service.

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