Huckleberries, blackberries, apples, pears, quince: members of the garden club scholarship fund have been trekking all summer from backyard to orchard, from garden to bramble, from low ground to high looking for the fruit we will preserve and sell at the annual Dance Palace Christmas Craft Fair.
Every year is different. Has there been a huckleberry sighting while the blackberries are still bursting? Was someone’s entire crop of plums purloined by four legged rascals? Did one apple tree with a fine reputation suddenly turn barren?
Lettuces, broccoli and all the summer annuals grow in neat rows, planted, weeded and watered. Fruit trees and vines, on the other hand, seem resolute in their independence; they might take a year off with no fruit, they sometimes thrive on properties long abandoned, they often survive uneven weather and they regularly endure repeated assaults from eager, non-human pickers.
Of course many rich orchards are faithfully tended. Recently I visited one of our club’s most ardent pear and apple growers. He himself was raised on a peach farm in Merced, tending trees with his father, canning and drying fruit with his mother. His wife remembers calling him at the farm a few weeks before they married. When she inquired, “What are you up to, honey?” he replied, “Why, I’m canning apricots for us!’” He’s canned ever since. And before he ever gets to that, he cultivates, prunes, grafts and contends with hungry, enterprising creatures who penetrate his fences and tree collars. “Best thing is to have a big dog!” he sighs.
But that’s no insurance. I know one large black Newfoundland who regularly asserts her right to her family’s raspberries. Her owner is resigned: “I get the tops of the bushes, Posie gets the bottoms.” In Merced, the cows apparently went after the figs. Who could blame them? Animal or human, we’re built for the hunt, and even the gentlest of us can’t resist the lure of fresh fruit.
For regular customers, the hunt consists of getting to our booth early, so they have their choice of preserves. What, no more lemon marmalade? I need it for the Christmas stockings!
Whether foraged on Mount Vision or scooped from jars of preserves, fruit is tied to memory and tradition. A plate of fresh asparagus is deliciously satisfying, but a fresh apple is a return to childhood. A neighbor told me that her family’s annual trips to U-pick farms marked the high moment of summer. “We packed up with three other families and all the kids and we drove, our mouths were already watering,” she said. “We filled baskets and tubs. We had to stop the kids from eating themselves sick. On the way home, we always went for a swim in the reservoir. The next day we had peach pancakes, then peach ice cream, then one of the other families made pies. What we didn’t eat, we canned.”
This year’s fruit crops, cultivated and wild, seem particularly uneven, and we hear the same refrain on all sides: it’s the drought. Whole brambles rich with bright red blackberries never turned black. And where were the huckleberries this year? Pears and apples failed to appear in the most reliable of orchards, or came forth early or came late. There are many explanations, like not enough water or not enough chill. But there’s never any talk of giving up the effort of growing. There’s always next year.
Our Christmas Craft Fair sale nets us about enough for one scholarship. This year we awarded 56 scholarships. The money comes in response to our annual appeal. So sometimes we ask ourselves: why all the effort of hunting and picking and canning? As we stand selling jar by jar, talking about our scholars and explaining our program, it seems only right to do it over fruit, the food of our lives. Historically, of course, we are an agricultural community. We have young farmers and ranchers, including some of our scholars, still looking to the earth for their future. So there we are, right in line with everybody else, looking to the earth for help with our scholars. Local fruit for local scholars is what we say.
Barbara Jay is a member of the Inverness Garden Club. The club’s Scholarship Fund has been sending West Marin youth, Bolinas to Tomales, to college since 1960.