farmdoc's blog post number 20

In Mole Creek winter is nigh. Almost all the leaves have fallen from our deciduous trees – mainly sycamores, some fruit trees. The orchard’s fruit trees are young and so not fully productive. But no matter, because around here there are many established fruit trees – mainly apples, some plums – on public land, so their fruit is available to all. This year their yield was especially bountiful and scrumptious – which pleased me, and also our goats and a couple of neighbourhood horses whom I treated with windfall apples. Our goats have all but eradicated blackberry from our land. But the roadside blackberry brambles were prolific this year. Just because ‘The best things in life are free’ (the title of a 1927 song) is a cliché doesn’t mean it’s not true. My family know me as careful with money if not downright parsimonious, so they would expect me to be delighted with free fruit from public trees. And I am. I savour the concept of something sold in a shop, being available gratis a few hundred metres from that shop. So when I pick fruit from public trees, I am thumbing my nose at a world in which everything that can be commodified and monetarised, has been. Almost. This ‘almost’ makes me warm inside, as winter is nigh.