Normally, I take the same route to work every day. A creature of habit, I know. But that seems to be the most direct way, and time is of the essence in the morning! I pass a row of crabapple trees along one street. They have been there a long time, and someone is looking after them, since they have been pruned this spring. I have picked the apples for a couple of years; they are the bright red ones, and right now, just after the frost, they are fully ripe and quite sweet. I would make some juice from them, and apple sauce. I still have some from last year -- I will make some muffins from them tonight, so I have room for this years' batch! Some years are not as prolific as others, so I have always learned to make good use of nature's bounty, for it is given to us to use. In other years, there may not be any at all.
There are a couple of tiny apples on some trees interspersed among the others. I think they are of some ornamental variety, have wonderful flowers, and maybe are necessary for the others to produce. They are not edible, I don't imagine. At the very end of this row is one tree not like the others. I have looked at it briefly last year, I recall, but it didn't seem to have any decent fruit on it, either too green or too small. So I normally just ignore it.
This year, I don't know why, I stopped to take a good look at what was on the tree. And it has quite a bit of fruit on it, albeit rather small, but interesting nonetheless. I examined a few of them, and many had already fallen off the tree. They were green, and rather hard -- not ripe, I guess. They had the most interesting shape to them! I picked a few the other morning, and gave one each to the girls I work with. I took some home.
Today, I decided to go and pick a whole bunch more. Since there were so many, and they were falling off the tree, I would put them to good use. So I picked a couple bags of the stuff, along with a bag of the red crabapples, and hung them on my bicycle handle-bars and rolled the bike home. No way was I going to try to ride it and balance these heavy bags as well!!
So I am including a pic here for you to try and identify. They look so familiar! Can anyone tell me what they are, and more importantly, if they are edible. I have a box full of them -- now what to do with them all.
1 comment:
I was just looking through your old blog posts and came upon the fruit picture. I'm fairly certain they're green d'anjou pears (they also come in a red variety). My mother's parents have a tree in their back yard, as well as a pair of bosc pear trees. Of course, in South Carolina they ripen just a tad earlier (July or so) than in Alberta.
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