Peach
The hot weather is back with us again today and after we had lunch we went back to the offices and after a few hours it was too hot to work. I went to give the dogs their supper and when I was coming back inside Normita wanted to go get a bit of fresh air. I joined her and we kept company to the boyz while they literally wolfed down their big bowl of food. I don’t know where they get the energy to eat so quickly on a hot day like this.
We walked around the yard a bit and then decided to harvest the peaches from the small tree next to the kitchen entrance. We had been saying we would do it since last week, but never got around to it. The neighborhood’s birds came down on that tree last week in day and feasted on the peaches and destroyed over 80% of the crop by eating half of most of the fruits and letting the other half rot. Normita went for a bad and a small stepladder and I went up in the tree and tried to salvage most of the peaches that were ripe and not half eaten by the birds.
Bacchus and Uriel, the boyz, were around us and catching whatever peaches they could grab that were falling from the tree. They eat them in one bite crushing the stone. It is awe inspiring to see them do it. I hope that tomorrow that tomorrow they do not wake up with a store stomach, but from past experience they have eaten much worse without any problems. They seem to have cast iron stomachs.
Here is a picture of the peaches that awaits in the sink the first one who will have the courage to go wash them:
The peaches waiting to be washed in the sink
We will keep the ripest ones to eat and tomorrow or Friday we will probably prepare some “compote de pêches” with the rest. We will use that as a dessert over ice cream and I think that I did see that we had a frozen Cornish hen the other day and we might roast it covered with the peaches next weekend if we have some time.
Lucito
We have a lot of fruit trees around the house including 4-5 peach trees, 4-5 pear trees, a few orange trees, a few lime trees, a ‘lima” tree which is a citrus tree that gives small yellow orange-like fruits that are lightly sweet, a pomegranate tree, a mandarin tree, a few prune trees, a few “capulines” tree that gives small tart berries, and a bush that produce some type of raspberry. Normally from late April to December we do not need to buy any fruits as the trees are producing a huge crop.
The first crop of the year are the peaches. Our trees produce a few varieties of very small peaches (~1-2 inches in diameter) with just a bit of fuzz and with a very hard flesh. When we moved here we thought they were not edible as they were very hard, but we rapidly found out that their hard flesh is very sweet and juicy.
The small peaches on the tree by the kitchen door.
This morning while we were passing the broom outside the house on the front patio and doing other chores like watering the trees, I found in the peach tree next to the kitchen door a small peach that looked ripe as it was larger than the other and bright red in color. I jumped up to take it and we tried it. Though it would have improved with another week or two on the branch, it was nice and sweet with just a bit of tartness. It looks promising for this season as all the trees are full with new fruits and in the coming weeks we will start our harvest.
Another view of the same tree.
I know someone who will be very happy about this as Bacchus, my Bouvier, loves to eat all the fallen fruits he can find and the peaches, stones and all, are his favorite. There is even a very small peach tree in the back that he can harvest himself and he takes good care of it and “waters” it daily…
Lucito