It was about noon on Monday, November 9, and somewhere around 55 or 60 degrees at the farm in Newberg. I parked the Land Cruiser and walked out to pick the end of the season’s fruit.
The persimmon tree is down toward the end, so you have to walk past everything else to get to it. The prunes, plums, apricots, the cherries, the figs, the pears, the apples. The leaves were down and the fruit was long gone. This time of year all that’s left is the wood. Every branch out in the open, gray and bare, like bones. Ready for pruning.
I spend a lot of time figuring out what a tree is worth after it comes down. Board feet and grade. Out here on the farm nobody cuts anything but a few branches in the winter. Me and the boys did that for many years. Recently Juan, who leases the ground, took on the pruning with his crew in place of a lease increase. Took me a couple hours to show them how I like it done. These trees stand where they were planted, most of them twenty-five years ago now, and every year they hand you something. Nobody has ever sprayed them. No pesticide, chemical or compound, so the crop is clean.
The cherries come first. They bloom first and ripen first, and you have to get to them before the birds do. Walking under them in November I remember eating them off the branch six months ago. Hard not to eat too many, especially the Rainiers. Persimmons are the same deal at the other end of the year. You get there ahead of the birds or you don’t get much.
This year, I got there ahead of the birds, mostly. The persimmons were hanging like little orange ornaments, shaped like tiny pumpkins. A couple of bags’ worth this year. I picked them all and stuffed both bags, maybe twenty pounds each.
Most were soft enough to eat. I peeled one, cut it into quarters, and popped them into my mouth right there under the tree. Sweet. Orange all the way through. No seeds. My tree almost never makes a seed. The big persimmons have dark brown seeds in them, but for some reason mine come small, a little smaller than an orange, and clean inside.
That’s the part I love. Fruit from trees is almost free. The trees do all the work. They take the sun, the rain and the bees and turn them into fruit of all kinds, year after year, and once a year, at varying times from June to November, each one turns some of that into something you can eat off the branch. Twenty-five years of that in Newberg. Nothing on it but what fell out of the sky. It’s good for you and you know exactly where it came from: real food.
They keep a few weeks in the fridge. Most of these will go to Thanksgiving, sliced onto salads and handed out to whoever wants some.
I was back at the Land Cruiser at one o’clock with the two bags. An hour, start to finish.