A three-second trip to the Google tells me that the quote for today is an anonymous Greek proverb. That quote is "Society grows great when old men plant trees under whose shade they know they shall never sit." It has always been a poignant quote for me, as someone who has an incredibly difficult relationship with the concept of "the future." I've never been good at making long-term plans. For example, I've never been in a job long enough to make a five-year plan. I've moved so many times that I was long gone before warranties ran out on appliances or on a new roof. My health has taken so many precipitous drops that I don't even take it as a given that I'll be in any condition to fulfill goals three, five, or ten years out. It is with this understanding of my own psyche that I view my actions lately as not only aberrant but oddly encouraging.
I finally started the plum wine this evening. I waited until I could go to the larger brew supply shop in town, which I did this evening. Between the Mr and our neighbor, we own most of the equipment needed to make wine, but most of it has also been used to brew beer, and I can't take the risk of cross-contamination. I wanted my own dedicated equipment for everything that will touch the actual product. Everything is currently sitting in the plastic primary fermenter, waiting for the water to cool enough to pitch the yeast. It's after 1 am as I write, and it is occurring to me that I probably won't be able to do this until morning. The house is just too warm, even now, with multiple fans drawing in cool night air. Even once that is done, when the wine is fermenting and then aging, I will not be able to drink a glass of it for months, probably a year, maybe multiple years. This is not a quick process, to make this sort of wine.
I mentioned last week that the plums themselves came from trees that my friend has been growing on her property for decades. They were given to her as a gift, and the person who gave them said these were pest and disease resistant. They would never need to be sprayed, she was told, and so she never put a drop of pesticide on them. This made me want to grow the exact same trees. I saved a handful of the pits, and read up (again on the Google) on how to make them sprout. They need cold, the instructions said, so they are in a zippy bag in my refrigerator, with a wet paper towel, right now. It will be six to eight weeks before I can expect a sprout, and all of next year's growing season before I know whether they will survive and grow. It will be many years before they produce fruit. But I will wait patiently, like I did for the cherry trees we planted (one of which bore lots of fruit this year), the nectarines, and the apple that died of blight but a sucker appeared next to the stump that the Mr is nurturing and encouraging to grow. If several of these plum pits actually sprout, then I will share them among my friends and family, like my daughter and my neighbor. What a great investment in the future these would be.
The first nectarine we planted two and a half years ago has beaten expectations. In early 2016 it was a two foot tall stick with a couple of spaghetti noodle sized branches coming off of its decapitated apical meristem. Now it is nine or ten feet tall, and this year it was covered in tiny fruits, many of which were well beyond my reach. I kept expecting them to swell and be as big as nectarines in the store. The Mr said maybe they were actually apricots, and the tree was mis-labeled. I picked one off the tree on Friday, and ate it. It is definitely a nectarine. They're just very small, pale fruits, with a fine peach fuzz on them. Today I grabbed an old Target bag and picked every one that released with the gentlest of twists. I ended up with more than 30 in the bag, and almost three times that many left on the tree. I know some will fall to the ground before I can get to them, but squirrels have to eat too, so I won't be too upset if I can't have them all. I'm not sure what I'll do with them. At first I'm going to leave them alone for a day or two to see whether they ripen to a deeper color. It was suggested that maybe since I'm on a wine-making kick, I could try to ferment some of these as well. That would definitely be increasing my investments in the future. I'm seriously considering it.
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