ms crankypants

Much of the Mornington Peninsula’s interior was orchard land in the earlier days, with endless rows of apple and pear trees lining the horizon almost everywhere you looked.

Even when I was younger (which wasn’t that long ago, truly), my mother worked as an apple picker and I loved to spend time out of the sun in the dark wooden coolstores where the fruit was stored for distribution throughout the year. The place where my parents now live was an orchard and the hill down the back paddock is still gently corrugated with a few ancient pear trees dotted about. Every spring and summer they’d be pruned magically level at the bottom branches and I could never work out how trees knew how to grow with such topiaried angles; then I walked down one day and saw the piggy-wig horses rearing to eat the young leaves, shoots and fruit — the trees were all trimmed to the height of the tallest horse’s reach.

Most of the fruit trees have given way to housing, supermarkets, industry, tax-dodging wineries and these strawberries. From late spring until mid-autumn you can stop at the strawberry farm around the corner from my house and collect a kilogram punnet picked that morning for ten dollars, or only eight dollars for fruit that needs to be eaten in a couple of days (they never last that long anyway).

The owners do a roaring trade and I’m not sure any berries reach the markets.

The superior strawberries are the last-picked autumn fruit and are blessed with gentler sunshine and more regular rain, however, the recent heatwave caused the grower to stop tending half the farm and this is the last punnet for the season. NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

Crank-o-meter: do not come between me and the berries

January 15th, 2010 | Tags: general delusions | Category: general delusions | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL