Dear Jephthah

How true do these words ring for you? Regardless of my concept of what God is, these words speak to me.

(This post should have been a reblog of Dave Barnhart’s Blog by the same name, but gremlins had other ideas – in my experience WP has a lot of them! At least, now there is a working link)

Feijoa Season!

Love them or loathe them, at this time of the year are are unavoidable. We have a short  6 metre long hedge consisting of six feijoa bushes that runs along part of the south boundary of our section (residential property). Every few days we gather several kilograms of the fruit.

An over abundance of feijoas!

Today, our granddaughter picked up 8.5 Kg (about 19 lbs) of the very aromatic fruit in around ten minutes. Harvesting is by collecting fallen fruit from the ground – never by picking off the tree, as picked fruit fails to develop as much flavour and sweetness as fallen fruit.

Thanks to methyl benzoate and similar chemicals, the potent aroma is what makes feijoa so unavoidable. It is very distinctive and during harvest season, which for us is May and June, the house positively reeks of it. It’s one of those smells you either love or loathe. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who is indifferent to it.

The picture is one I took a few days ago. The two bags our grandson is holding contain 5 Kg (11 lbs) of feijoas. Five bags of fruit were gathered that day totalling about 12 Kg (26 lbs). The three grandchildren gathered them in little more than five minutes

For those unfamiliar with the fruit, it tastes a little like guava, a little like pineapple, a little like pear and a little like tart berries. Yep, it’s like eating a very flavoursome fruit salad. Delicious! They are best eaten raw, but are very nice in a cooked desert such as apple and feijoa crumble. It also makes a wonderful aromatic jam.

Inevitably, we give away most of our crop to family, friends and neighbours, as do most people with more than a single bush – they’re such prolific croppers. The rest we consume fresh or it’s frozen for making into desserts or smoothies over the next six to twelve months.

As I have already mentioned, it’s a fruit you either love or loathe. At this time of the year, if you visit someone and the place doesn’t smell of feijoa then in all probability they do not like the fruit, and you can be sure they’ve turned down many offers of feijoas over recent days. Don’t risk harming a friendship by offering them any.