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The Would-Be Farm: Wildflowers

6/12/2019

They show up. How cool is that?

I may have planted these columbines.

I might have planted them last year.

They might have been growing for decades, regardless my interference or ambitions.

One of the downsides of being an absentee farmer is that things happen –– and don't happen –– without our being there to witness it.

Sometimes we do.

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You Chee, I Chee, We All Chee for Lychee

6/4/2019

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Scientific name: Sapindaceae Lichi.

Yeah, okay, I know lychee-tinis are SO 2012. But a lychee smoothie? With vanilla almond-milk and crushed ice?

Lychee warm from the tree, with the leathery rind splitting under the pressure of a thumb?

Or a plain frozen slurry of lychee, gobbled straight from the cup?

Lychee harvest, 2019

Some fruits are easy: drop a loquat seed –– Japanese plum, or Eriobotrya Japonica –– into the ground and before long, you have fifteen of the things (maybe fewer if you were a more conscientious weeder, but there you go...). And likewise, buckets of the nice juicy yellow fruit. We eat them straight off the tree, bending at the waist to avoid the unavoidable sloppy drips.

So many shirts at our house have been transformed into "work shirts" by the application of loquat juice.

Loquats in March.

Lychee blossoms. No saying how many will set fruit.

Other fruits –– once you see them as fruits –– are even easier to grow. Try stopping staghorn sumac (Rufus typhena).

Plant blackberry canes, forget about them, come back a few years later and they (Rosascea family) have established a stable government, border security, and a thriving economy.

Others, like apples at the Would-Be Farm, are fussier and more delicate. In Florida, I think the fussy ones are the lychees. (We'll avoid the idea of citrus, what with canker and citrus greening and my neighbor with the Roundup through the fence.)

We've planted a couple of lychees, but they break your heart: plenty of leaves, but year after year no fruit at all. Mr. Linton occasionally brandishes the loppers and tells the tree: "Fruit or these. Your choice."

Over the past ten years or so, when the weather and the trees actually do produce a crop, roving thieves have stripped the tree of fruit overnight. Seriously, stealing fruit from my very lawn. It's enough to make a mare bite her colt.

But then comes the odd pay-out year.

When the tree is heavy with fruit and Uncle Markie has put an actual fence around the front yard with the eldest of the lychees, which strangely enough, DOES keep the damnable sneak-theives away.

When there are buckets of lychees. An extravagance of the pearly goodness.

When, at least for a week or two, lychees are our favorite fruit.

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The Would-Be Farm: Wildflowers

You Chee, I Chee, We All Chee for Lychee

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