The weather has not been kind to our garden fruits this year. Too cold and dry for many months, then hot without rain, the red currants ripened more than two weeks later than in a normal year.
The peaches are the size of plums, who knows how they will turn out.
The thunderstorm that ended several months without precipitation started out with hail which ripped all grapes off the vine.
And tomatoes?
What tomatoes?
Instead of fresh fruit out of the garden, we are stuck with grocery store produce. Sure, it is not as gross as the "fresh fruit and vegetables" aisles in the UK or Ireland but that's not a good baseline.
To the blogster, not having to see the grapefruit at the store for a few months out of the year has become strangely important in Germany. Because grapefruit in this country are awfully sour.
As if someone took a bicycle tire pump to a lemon.
On a particularly bad day, this weird image comes to the blogster's mind: a huge, artificially lit warehouse somewhere in Southern Europe, trucks of lemons arrive at one end, incessant streams of small yellow fruit run down wide chutes into the building and onto conveyor belts. Poor migrants stand there twelve or sixteen hours a day, sticking bicycle pumps into lemons, pumping them up into round grapefruits. Migrant children peel tiny labels off of drums, stick them on the grapefruit, and more migrants pack them into crates that are then shipped to Northern Europe to be sold at just under a Euro a fruit.
Having picked ripe grapefruit off a tree in the Southern United States can do that to you.
The best places to pick your own are not farms, by the way. Incomparably juicy and sweet grapefruit can be found in retirement community trailer parks in the southern US deserts.
You see, when people move there, many plant grapefruit trees.
As the trees mature, folks get older, and many of them suddenly find themselves on medication that requires a strict "no citrus" diet.
Go there in November and December and ask nicely, and you can pick as much grapefruit as you want.
The side effect: it spoils you forever.
The last time we did that, we raided a paper bag bin at a Safeway cash register in town and filled bag after bag. The car smelled like fresh grapefruit for months afterwards.
We were just north of one of the unpleasant inland border control check points where everybody has to stop and answer the question: are you a US citizen?
Imagine showing up at a checkpoint with the back seat and the trunk filled with paper bags full of grapefruit, the passenger said. Sir, may I see the grapefruit. Well, more like, get out of the car, what's with the grapefruit? Maybe they'd have one of those unruly German shepherds all over the bags, ripping some of the bursting fruit, and you'd leave with a puddle of fresh chomped juice slowly running from the back seats towards the front, emerging from under the driver seat as if you'd have peed in the car.
If you travel for more than a day, make sure to offer the desk clerk at the motel a bag.
Should anybody feel like airlifting some trailer park grapefruit to Europe, let me know. I'll pick up a crate at any airport within a day's driving distance.
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