Mangoes
I am getting more and more interested in growing fruit, rather than flowers, in gardens. I also like to see fruit trees in public streets. In Singapore you see huge mango trees along the East Coast road.
I saw one mango on the ground but it was crawling with insects. A family, probably the maid or nanny or amah and two or three children with a fruit picker, came out of a nearby house and took the whole crop off the nearest tree.
I felt like going up and asking for one of the mangoes. Would they have shared?
In another part of Singapore I saw a tiny mango tree, about my size. An officious threatening label warned you not to pick the fruit.
Does the baby tree need its fruit? In the UK we planted six vines. The first year or two you pick off the small, sour, bunches of grapes, to make the plant divert its energy to the roots.
Orchids
Now I'm wondering about pinching off the roots growing out of my potted orchids in the UK. Would that encourage the plant to grow more flowers? (You can buy orchids year round in British supermarkets such as Tesco or Marks and Spencer plus Morrisons, as well as Homebase DIY/garden/furniture store.)
We had a tree full of hard green, small figs. A hunt on the internet revealed people all over the USA giving recipes for cooking and bottling figs.
Did it work? Yes. A great success. Here's a commercial one.
Figs In Syrup
Figs, too hard to eat, however, are great when cooked tender and bottled in syrup. They come up like chestnuts, soft and sticky and flavourful.
I tried putting the hard figs in little r a m e k i n s on the kitchen windowsill. The figs never softened. They shrivelled and dried out and were twice as hard. Add water and they grow mouldy.
No, you need to pick the whole lot at the end of the season, enough to make it worthwhile to spend an hour or two, or waste a whole afternoon or day, boiling away the nasty white sap, cooking them soft, washing out your saved jam jars or marmalade jars, sterilising the jars. (Or buying fresh jars, only worthwhile if you are buying a dozen or more wholesale, otherwise you are not economising.
Although, it is satisfying to cook your own fruit, for fun, as an experiment, or to control what you are eating. But, of course, all that syrup is full of sugar, hardly good for your teeth.
Bottling is a long-winded caper. First you must use a jar sterilised in boiling water - another hazard. Maybe you can use sterilising tablets which are used for baby's milk bottles?
Labels
Finally, the fun part, yet another cost of this supposedly 'free' food, is labelling. You can buy labels with framed coloured edges and write on them by hand using a felt tip pen. Draw a faint pencil mark or frame your writing with two rulers, or make a letterbox shape for the writing. Write slowly.
Alternatively, if you have a printer, print off the word FIGS, adding a border. Or save labels from supermarket food, or cut out titles from the advertisement and recipes in the free newspaper from your supermarket.
You might like to add the date of bottling, even a best by date.
Family Teamwork
I didn't do the figs bottling. I just researched the recipe and did the jar labelling. I got the family 'chef' to make the figs in syrup. He thought it was a lot of work. He made a batch of two or more jars.
Portion Control
By dividing each fig into two and adding it to fruit or ice cream as a treat about once a month, we managed to make our jars last more than a year, enough to keep us going until the next crop.
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author, speaker.
