So when we bought our little farm I didn't realize that we had several fruit and nut trees on our property. Pears, walnuts and figs to be exact. I almost feel like these particular fruits and nuts were "meant to be" part of my future. Now I personally didn't have much history eating pears and figs perse but I knew that my Oma (German Grandma) always had a fig tree in her garden and she always talked about how "Ganz fein"(very delicious) they were. Then earlier this month I found out from my dad that my great uncle had a pear orchard when he retired. My dad also explained to me how he used to always pick walnuts from his yard when he was a kid. So now all these innocuous fruits are randomly on our farm and somehow I feel connected to my past in a weird way. I feel compelled to gather, eat, and preserve these fruits each year to somehow pay homage to my family of the past. So a few weeks ago when the pear tree was ready to be harvested I was super excited to see what I could do with all these pears! Now I have no experience harvesting pears and I had to watch many you tube videos and I still had to guess at the right time to harvest. You see, pears don't ripen on the tree, they have to be picked and then allowed to ripen for about a week off the tree, so if you pick too soon there is no fixing the mistake. You just end up with under-ripe hard fruit. If you wait for the fruit to feel ripe then you have waited too long and the fruit will be rotten from the inside out. I took a guess and after a week we had some of the juiciest, most delicious pears I had ever eaten! Honestly I don't know why I hadn't been eating more pears all my life! I must have picked 300 pears from our 1 producing tree. I shared many with friends and neighbors, then I had to break out the canning supplies for the rest! It was a great start to harvesting our own food from our land and it really established that connection to my past, grounded me with the present, and made me hopeful for what will be cultivated in the future.
