The fruits of our labour

This morning I spent time picking up macadamia nuts from the lawn. In previous years the sulphur crested cockatoos have left us only a handful of nuts but this year there are enough to warrant gathering them - they are not ripe until they fall from the trees. Only a few are left on the tree and this is how they look
(Click on the pictures to enlarge)

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Of course you can recognise the nuts more easily from this picture.

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I deliberately left the outer casing on a couple of them so that you can see how they develop inside a tough inedible fruit. The shell around the nut is so hard to crack that only a vice will do it - using a hammer results in the nut shooting off in one direction or another unscathed or else the edible part of the nut is crushed between shards of smashed shell! How the cockatoos manage to bore holes into the casing and get at the inner soft nut, I really do not know - but they manage very well indeed! There were plenty of macadamia nuts on the ground with round holes in them and no soft flesh in the middle.
Living in the subtropics the climate is not suitable for apples and pears - however we did manage to find a "tropical pear" which we planted many years ago and has borne up to six pear shaped fruit each year - but full of Coddling moth grubs so we haven't managed to taste them.
This year, for some unknown reason, the tree is absolutely laden with fruit.

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As you can see there are quite a few pears on the lawn under the tree. to begin with I picked up and started to prepare the fruit from under the tree, thinking that they would be riper than those still hanging - but all but one were bruised inside from the invasion of little hatched coddling moth grubs. Back I went to the tree again and this time picked a bucket full from there.

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This time the fruit was free of grubs - but extremely hard and woody. I boiled the pears in sugar and water with half a teaspoon of cinnamon. It took forever for the fruit to soften. When I tasted the fruit all it tasted like was sugar and cinnamon! The pears have very little taste to them, I guess I will leave them to the coddling moths and the fruit bats! I will not remove the trees, at least they provide food for some creatures!
Our mangoes are just coming into season now. They have been in the fruit shops since before Christmas but the ones on our trees are not ripe yet.

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I did pick three of them and have put them on the window-sill to ripen. What happens when the fruit is close to ripe is that the fruit bats from all over South East Queensland come to my garden and demolish everything and finding a fruit that does not have a bite taken from it is very difficult.
There are also fruits that I will not be able to reach that are hanging over the creek at the bottom of the garden

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We may have to devise some way of putting a net onto a long pole to capture that fruit above the water!
Walking back to the house after checking the fruit trees (we live on a one acre block of land) I passed the last of our orange trees. Over the years there have been so many floods come through where the citrus are growing that only one tatty tree is left standing.

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Once again we do have trouble with the Sulphur Crested Cockatoos among the citrus - they know which of them have seeds - they loved the lemons so much that we only managed to pick a handful. While the fruit is as green as the orange in the picture above, the birds would fly into the tree and tear the fruit apart to get at the lemon pips! (Now you know why they have yellow feathers on the top of their head! Its from all the lemons they eat!)
So we only have one orange tree left where we once had eight. I shall purchase more but will have to plant them on higher ground since each year there is a deeper flood as more and more people put fill into their low ground to stop THEIR flooding - it is forcing the floods further and further back. If it raises much higher we will have to move the big shed!
Just one more fruit picture for luck!

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I doubt if we shall ever be self sufficient with our fruit growing but we do manage to keep a lot of the native wildlife happy!
AJ
joanren@gmail.com