No Fruit For You.

We're surrounded by fruit trees and it doesn't do us a damned bit of good. 

One neighbor has a cherry tree that overhangs our yard.  Every year, it looks lovely when the cherry blossoms are in bloom.  Then the petals fall all over our patio -- in one big Whooompf -- and they're next to impossible to sweep up. (If it's dry out, they just fly around as you try to sweep them. If it rains, they weld themselves to the patio.)  I'm assuming all of those blossoms must produce some cherries, but I've seen roughly three of them.  Ever.

The same neighbor has a pear tree and part of that overhangs our yard too.  It gets totally loaded with pears every year.

I have no idea whether or not they're any good.  Before they get a chance to ripen, the squirrels get at them.  We tend to find a bunch of them on the ground with one squirrely bite taken out of each one. Here's one that made it all the way across the yard to our fire escape.

We've got a fig tree.

I like Fig Newtons. I've never even thought about making them.  I don't know what else has figs in it that I might like, but the figs usually get given to whichever neighborhood restaurant we want to be nice to us.

The neighbor on the other side has an apple tree.  Well, to be technical, the tree is two houses away, but 99% of the tree leans over the next-door neighbor's yard.

Again, I'm not sure what variety of apples these are, so I don't know whether or not they'd be any good. 

But it's a moot point.  1. Nobody can reach the apples.  2.  They tend to fall out of the tree before they're ripe.  3. They explode when they reach terminal velocity and hit the ground.  I'm not sure what causes them to fall -- could be wind, or squirrels.  Or vibrations from cars in Pennsylvania.  Of time travelers stepping on butterflies.

But that's not important. What's important is that they do fall.  Imagine you're hiding in a large iron pipe.  And imagine that someone is throwing hand grenades at the iron pipe at random intervals.  That's what it sounds like when the apples fall.

On the good side, for some odd reason, the squirrels allow us to keep any radishes, cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers we can grow.  And those are both reachable and really, really tasty.  It won't be long now before the first crop is ready.

Yum.