the $128 dollar apricot

Many of you are famil­iar with William Alexander’s book, The $64 tomato. In its pages he installs thou­sands of square feet of new gar­den space and then does the unthinkable–adding up how much it all cost him, down to how much it cost him for that Brandy­wine tomato he was hold­ing in his hand. (Sixty-four dol­lars per tomato, as you might guess from the book’s title.)

Pricey, for sure, but in the end he comes to a con­clu­sion about gar­den­ing: “It’s not about what it actu­ally costs to eat this piece of fruit. It’s really about lifestyle.”

One of my lit­tle lifestyle indulges is apri­cots. I love apri­cots. John loves apri­cots. But the apricot-shaped objects you get in the stores around here have noth­ing to do with what the fruit should taste like.

It seemed like a no-brainer: We could plant a tree of our own. We could pick the fruit when it was ripe, not when it was deemed at the proper stage for pick­ing and trans­port by some indus­trial fruit-growing out­fit hun­dreds of miles away.

The real no-brain part of this adven­ture kicked in after we actu­ally put the tree in the ground. Coastal San Diego has win­ters that tend to be too mild for apri­cots to set fruit, even if you select the low-chill vari­eties. The tree always blooms, usu­ally just a few clus­ter of flow­ers on ran­dom stems dis­trib­uted around the tree. I see bees vis­it­ing the flow­ers. I’ve even tried my hand at pol­li­nat­ing them myself. But those flow­ers don’t usu­ally turn into fruit. If we’d really been think­ing we wouldn’t have both­ered try­ing to grow one in the first place.

Last year was the best in the over fif­teen years the tree has been in the ground, when the tree set almost twenty fruits. Out of those we prob­a­bly got some­thing like eight or nine before the crit­ters got to them.

This year we’re down to one fruit, and it still hasn’t got­ten to the point where we can pick it. It’s down to the final few days, and it’ll be a race against the critters.

128_dollar_apricot

Why do we pur­sue this per­verse lifestyle, chas­ing the occa­sional apri­cot? In the years when we get fruit it’s always a rev­e­la­tion: The scent that pre­pares you for the first bite of fruit. The del­i­cate bal­ance of tart­ness and sweet­ness. The absolutely per­fect sen­sa­tion of all the things a good apri­cot should be.

But as I think about things like sus­tain­abil­ity and what’s the best use of soil in a gar­den where cos­mo­log­i­cal space seems to be con­tract­ing, this indul­gence is get­ting harder to jus­tify. A new plum tree twenty feet away has already borne two fruits, and a fig nearby is sud­denly cov­ered with tiny figs. There are bet­ter choices out there than try­ing to make an apri­cot thrive where it wasn’t designed to grow.

Loquat fruitAt the top of the list for an apri­cot replace­ment next fall is the loquat. Deli­cious fruits. Low water needs. Orna­men­tal ever­green tree, with a man­age­able final size. And the tree actu­ally bears well in this climate.

(Image: Oldie, from the Wiki­me­dia Com­mons, made avail­able under GNU Free Doc­u­men­ta­tion License, Ver­sion 1.2)

June 08 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: | 4 Comments »

once an orchard

I wanted to find the quince tree again.

It prob­a­bly had been close to ten years since I last hiked my nearby Los Peñas­qui­tos Canyon Pre­serve. Still I clearly remem­bered com­ing upon an ancient but still fruit­ing quince in one of the trib­u­tary canyon bot­toms. Unwa­tered for decades and tended only by the wildlife, it had seemed like a mir­a­cle of sur­vival in San Diego’s desert climate.

Survivor quinceLast Sat­ur­day I scootered up to the pre­serve and started a slow stroll through the native wil­lows and sycamores and oaks that line the dry creek in López Canyon. I only vaguely remem­bered the loca­tion, but less than half a mile in, right by the side of the trail, there it was, still very much alive, green and loaded with fruit.

Fruit on old quince tree

Nearby, in the shade of an old sycamore and crowded with some robust shrubs–including poi­son oak–I found a sec­ond tree with fruit on its branches.

Quince and poison oak

And then I started look­ing around in earnest. Off to the left stood a dif­fer­ent kind of tree, either a dif­fer­ent quince or maybe even a pear. It had a thick, creased trunk and the plant was clearly old. But the tree still drooped a lit­tle from the weight of the fruit.

Quince or pear treeQuince or pear fruit

Old apricot in Lopez CanyonNot far ahead stood another spec­i­men. Though with­out fruit it was clearly another fruit­ing tree, prob­a­bly an apri­cot, judg­ing by its leaves, a month after the last of its offer­ings would have been ripe.

So that made for four trees that I could find with­out crawl­ing through more poi­son oak or fur­ther through the snakey grass. I’m cer­tain all the trees were many decades old, but exactly how old I couldn’t say for sure.

Local his­tory places an orchard oper­a­tor in this canyon as late as 1921, so some of the trees may date to then, though this area has been ranched and cul­ti­vated at least as early as the early 1800s, when this area was con­tained in the first of the Mex­i­can land grants in Alta Cal­i­for­nia, to as recently as 1962, when the land was acquired by the County.

Ruiz-Alvarado adobe, San DiegoNearby, under a pro­tec­tive shel­ter at the con­flu­ence of López Canyon and Los Peñas­qui­tos Canyon, stand the remains of the Ruiz-Alvarado Adobe, one of the old­est struc­tures in San Diego County.

Any­thing older than a hun­dred years around these parts is con­sid­ered a relic. If you were to believe the most wish­ful of the sources the adobe would date all the way back to 1815, though more reli­able sources place its con­struc­tion at 1857. This small adobe, along with a later, grander one to the east, became part of a thriv­ing con­cern ded­i­cated to ranching.

Ruiz-Alvarado adobe, San DiegoMaybe it’s wish­ful and over-romanticizing on my own part–or maybe not–to imag­ine that the set­tlers who lived in this adobe planted the fruit trees in López Canyon. But the trees are as much of the human his­tory of this area as are the few remain­ing adobe walls. Here we need all the his­tory that we’ve got.

July 25 2008 | Categories: places | Tags: • • • • • • • • | 2 Comments »