piece of pie

Yipe! more rain, wind and sunshine, good ol' nature just doesn't stop.  After some 20 plus years of neglect (aside from the most pragmatically brutal trimming) the garden we inherited with our newish property has flourished after the first decent winter-spring and summer rains in close to 15 years. My old hometown has been part of a drought affected area for that whole time, lakes that I swam in as a kid, ceased to exist.

However, it seems with our arrival last year, the weather pattern has swung back to a slightly distorted, but familiar pattern. Hot hot heat in summer, and rainfall in winter. Of course it's much more swampy than it used to be, and the hot days are a whole new sort of heat. Scorchio!

And what rain we had.  Floods in summer, steady rain through winter, the old fruit trees haven't had it so good for so long, they've produced fruit for the first time in over a decade (or so we hear). On top of our usual busy lifestyle, creating art and taking care of the day to day, we have become warrior gardeners, fighting the neglect of the past and trying to usher in a new golden age of new growth and helping the old come back to life.  Sadly, the age and neglect have led to some trees collapsing under their own weight, from heavy rain and winds, or too much fruit, if you can believe it.

Picture if you will, the Inaluxe folk, picking up fallen fruit, trying to make pies and harvesting their own vegetables with locust and mosquitoes at our heels.  Birds swooping on our freshly fallen pears, picking the figs right off the tree, sparrows, blackbirds, even those wonderful lorikeets making a meal of anything we're too slow to pick up ourselves. Thankfully those cheeky crows (or were they ravens?) have moved on, they were clever enough to hop into the shed and crack open the bag of birdseed I had stashed away!

Even giving away the excess fruit has it's own set of problems, you get an equal amount of some other fruit from a family member, what am I going to do with all these plums I got... does apple and plum pie sound feasible? 

so many pears, so little time -- pears from our own pear tree!

  words and image - Jason inaluxe